Building an RPG with Unity 2018 Second Edition

▶Book Description
In a role-playing game (RPG), users control a character, usually in the game's imaginary universe. Unity has become a top choice for developers looking to create these kinds of immersive RPGs.

Building an RPG with Unity 2018, based on building some of the most common RPG features, teaches you tips, tricks, and techniques that can be applied to your own game.

To start with, the book guides you through the fundamentals of role-playing games. You will learn the necessary aspects of building an RPG, such as structuring the game environment, customizing characters, controlling the camera, and designing other attributes such as inventory and weapons. You will also explore designing game levels by adding more features. Once you have understood the bigger picture, you will understand how to tackle the obstacles of networking in Unity and implement multiplayer mode for your RPG games.

By the end of the book, you will be able to build upon the core RPG framework elements to create your own immersive games.

▶What You Will Learn
⦁ Construct a framework for inventory, equipment, characters, enemies, quests, and game events
⦁ Understand how to load and unload scenes and assets
⦁ Create multiplayer game settings for your RPG
⦁ Design a UI for user input and feedback
⦁ Implement AI for non-character players
⦁ Customize your character at runtime

▶Key Features
⦁ Get insights into Unity's user interface (UI) system and and build UIs for your RPG
⦁ Implement artificial intelligence (AI) to build intelligent entities that take your game to the next level
⦁ Develop multiplayer features for an RPG using Unity 2018

▶Who This Book Is For
This book is written for individuals who want to learn and apply their Unity skills for the creation of an RPG. It is assumed that the reader has a basic understanding of the concepts of programming and is comfortable with the basics of Unity's IDE. This book gives a strong and solid foundation of the core concepts and topics that can be applied to build your own game experience.

▶What this book covers
⦁ Chapter 1, What is an RPG?, provides a good background of what an RPG is. It covers some historical aspects and gives examples of existing RPGs. It discuss the main aspects of an RPG, covers some terminology, and prepares the reader for the rest of the book.

⦁ Chapter 2, Planning the Game, is where we take a look at character definitions, character class attributes, character states, and how to set up and rig character models, which includes an exploration of motion, controllers, and inverse kinematics.

⦁ Chapter 3, RPG Character Design, continues expanding on player character customization and looks at preserving character states, the setup of Non-Player Characters (NPCs), and introducing NPC Artificial Intelligence (AI) and interaction.

⦁ Chapter 4, The Game Mechanics, is where we start planning the game. We discuss the different types of assets and resources we will need during the creation of our game, introduce a third-person character controller, and create our initial level and scripts. We also take a look at the Terrain Toolkit for terrain generation.

⦁ Chapter 5, GameMaster and Game Mechanics, looks at enhancing the Game Master script, introduces Level Controller and Audio Controller scripts, discusses the storage of character data and the character customization state, and explores options for the initial user interface for the main menu.

⦁ Chapter 6, Inventory System, covers the creation of a generic inventory system; the creation of the necessary scripts, assets, and prefabs that represent the inventory items; designing the inventory user interface; and how to represent the inventory system and its items.

⦁ Chapter 7, User Interface and System Feedback, discusses the design and implementation of a heads-up display, player character information panel, and the active inventory items panel. The special inventory items panel is designed and implemented, as are the non-player character health bar and UI.

⦁ Chapter 8, Multiplayer Setup, discusses multiplayer programming using Unity's Unet architecture. This chapter illustrates the concepts using two sample projects. The initial project is a tank game that illustrates the concepts of server client and data synchronization. The second project applies what we have learned to create a scene supporting our character models.