Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

Build immersive game experiences using the new Unity 2020 features with this practical guide

▶Book Description
Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences.

With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games.

By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale.

▶What You Will Learn
⦁Write scripts for customizing various aspects of a game, such as physics, gameplay, and UI
⦁Program rich shaders and effects using Unity's new Shader Graph and Universal Render Pipeline
⦁Implement postprocessing to increase graphics quality with full-screen effects
⦁Create rich particle systems for your Unity games from scratch using VFX Graph and Shuriken
⦁Add animations to your game using the Animator, Cinemachine, and Timeline
⦁Implement game artificial intelligence (AI) to control character behavior
⦁Detect and fix optimization issues using profilers and batching

▶Key Features
⦁Unleash the capabilities of C# scripting for creating immersive UI, graphics, Game AI agents and much more
⦁Explore Unity's latest tools, including Universal Render Pipeline, Shader Graph, and VFX graph, to enhance graphics and animation
⦁Get started with building augmented reality experience using Unity's AR Foundation

▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for game developers looking to migrate to the Unity game engine. If you are a developer with some exposure to Unity, this book will help you explore its latest features. Prior experience with C# programming is required to get the most out of the book.

▶What this book covers
⦁ Chapter 1, Designing a Game from Scratch, is where we will discuss the details of the game we are going to create in the book before even opening Unity for the first time.

⦁ Chapter 2, Setting Up Unity, is where you will learn how to install and set up Unity on your computer, and is also where you will create your first project.

⦁ Chapter 3, Working with Scenes and GameObjects, is where we will learn about the concepts of Scenes and GameObjects, which are part of Unity's way of describing what your game world is composed of.

⦁ Chapter 4, Grayboxing with Terrain and ProBuilder, is where we will be creating our first level layout and prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.

⦁ Chapter 5, Importing and Integrating Assets, introduces graphics. As Unity is not a tool for creating graphics, but for displaying them, we will learn how to improve our Scene art by importing graphics into Unity.

⦁ Chapter 6, Materials and Effects with URP and Shader Graph, is where we will see how to use one of the latest Unity Render Systems (Universal Render Pipeline) and how to create effects with the Shader Graph feature.

⦁ Chapter 7, Visual Effects with Particle Systems and VFX Graph, is where you will learn how to create visual effects, for things such as water and fire, using the two main Unity tools for doing so: Particle Systems and the VFX Graph.

⦁ Chapter 8, Lighting Using the Universal Render Pipeline, covers lighting. Lighting is a concept big enough to have its own chapter. Here we will deepen our knowledge of the Universal Render Pipeline, specifically looking at its lighting capabilities.

⦁ Chapter 9, Fullscreen Effects with Post-Processing, delves into effects and post-processing. To get that cinematic effect that most modern games have today, we will learn how to add a layer of effects on top of our Scene graphics using the post-processing feature of the Universal Render Pipeline.

⦁ Chapter 10, Sound and Music Integration, gets into an often-neglected area: sound. Being underestimated by most beginner developers, here we will learn how to properly add sound and music to our game, taking into consideration its impact on performance.

⦁ Chapter 11, User Interface Design, explores the use of the user interface (UI). Of all the graphic-based ways to communicate information to the user, the use of the UI is the most direct. We will learn how to display information in the form of text, images, and life bars using the Unity UI system.

⦁ Chapter 12, Creating Animations with Animator, Cinemachine, and Timeline, moves us on from our simple static Scene. In this chapter, we will start moving our characters with animations and creating cutscenes with the latest Unity features for doing so.

⦁ Chapter 13, Introduction to Unity Scripting with C#, is the first programming chapter of the book. We will learn how to create our first script using C# in the Unity way.

⦁ Chapter 14, Implementing Movement and Spawning, is where we will learn how to program the movement of our objects and how to spawn them. General programming knowledge is assumed from now on.

⦁ Chapter 15, Physics Collisions and Health System, is where you will learn how to configure the physics settings of objects to detect when two of them collide and react to the collision. To put this in practice, we'll be creating a health system.

⦁ Chapter 16, Win and Lose Conditions, is where we will be detecting when the game should end, which will be when the player either wins it or loses it.

⦁ Chapter 17, Scripting the UI, Sounds, and Graphics, is where we will be making the previously created UI to show the relevant and current information of the game, such as the player's health and the score. Also, we'll look at sounds being played when necessary and the use of visual effects to reflect the actions of the player.

⦁ Chapter 18, Implementing Game AI to Build Enemies, is where we will be creating basic AI using several Unity features to create challenging enemies in our game.

⦁ Chapter 19, Scene Performance Optimization, explores performance. Making our game perform well is no easy task, and it is certainly a requirement if we want to release it. Here we will be learning how to profile our game's performance and tackle the most common performance issues.

⦁ Chapter 20, Building the Project, is where we will learn how to convert our Unity project into an executable format to distribute it to other people and run it without Unity being installed.

⦁ Chapter 21, Finishing Touches, is where we will briefly discuss how to move forward with the development of our game after finishing this book, discussing topics such as how to iterate and release the game.

⦁ Chapter 22, Augmented Reality in Unity, gives you an introduction to augmented reality (AR). In this extra chapter, we will be learning how to create an AR application with Unity's AR Foundation package, one of the most recently released ways to create AR applications with Unity.