Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development

Create, customize, and optimize your own professional games from scratch with Unity 2021, 2nd Edition

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801077286
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming in C#
• Index: Computer Science

Achieve mesmerizing game experiences using the latest Unity 2021 features by following a practical approach to building professional games

Key Features

• Unleash the capabilities of C# scripting to create UIs, graphics, game AI agents and more
• Explore Unity's latest tools, including Universal Render Pipeline, Shader Graph, UI Toolkit, Visual Scripting, and VFX graph, to enhance graphics and animation
• Build an AR experience using Unity's AR Foundation

Book Description

Learning how to use Unity is the quickest way to creating a full game, but that's not all you can do with this simple, yet comprehensive suite of video game development tools – Unity is just as useful for creating AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and practical games for training and education.

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development outlines a practical journey to creating your first full game from the ground up, building it step-by-step and applying your knowledge as you progress.

Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you how to develop the game using several Unity tools. As you advance, you will learn how to use the Unity engine, create simple scripts using C#, integrate graphics, sound, and animations, and manipulate physics to create interesting mechanics for your game. You'll be able to apply all the knowledge that you gain to a real-world game.

Later chapters will show you how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs efficiently. Finally, you'll work with Unity's AR tools to create AR experiences for 3D apps and games.

By the end of this Unity book, you will have created a complete game and built a solid foundation in using a wide variety of Unity tools.

What you will learn

• Explore both C# and Visual Scripting tools to customize various aspects of a game, such as physics, gameplay, and the UI
• Program rich shaders and effects using Unity's new Shader Graph and Universal Render Pipeline
• Implement postprocessing to improve 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
• Use the brand new UI Toolkit package to create user interfaces
• Implement game AI to control character behavior

Who this book is for

This book is best suited for game developers looking to upgrade their knowledge and those who want to migrate their existing skills to the Unity game engine. Those with prior Unity knowledge will also benefit from the chapters exploring the latest features. While you'll still able to follow along if you don't have any programming experience, knowing the fundamentals of C# programming will help you get the most out of this book.

Section 1 – Our First Level

In this section, you will learn about the fundamental concepts of Unity, such as scene creation and asset management, to create your first playable prototype game level.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Designing a Game from Scratch
• Chapter 2, Setting Up Unity
• Chapter 3, Working with Scenes and Game Objects
• Chapter 4, Grayboxing with Terrain and ProBuilder
• Chapter 5, Importing and Integrating Assets

Chapter 1: Designing a Game from Scratch

Welcome to the first chapter of the book! I am sure you are as super excited as I am to start this amazing journey into game development with Unity. We will be approaching game development in four parts. First, we will be talking about the basics of game development, looking at topics such as how to design your game before you start coding, and then we will prototype a simple first level using Unity. Then, we will dive into graphics to explore the look and feel of a good game. Later, we will learn how to get everything moving through the use of scripting. Finally, we will see how you can finish and publish your game. As you go through the chapters, you will apply every concept to a full game project, so you will end the book with a fully functional shooter game.

In this chapter, we will design our game, Super Shooter. This phase is known as pre-production, where we will create a development plan. Our game design will include all the functionality we want in our game: the player character, the non-player characters, game assets, animations, and more. We will also use screen mock-ups to document our game's design. We will look at related concepts regarding the use of Unity for our game along the way. We will be discussing which pieces of documentation are necessary for all design work we will be doing throughout this chapter.

Specifically, we will examine the following concepts in this chapter:

• Game concept
• Game characters
• Gameplay
• The difficulty balance
• Documentation

Game concept

Why not just start developing our game instead of designing it? This question is spawned from the excitement of developing games, especially with the Unity game engine. All games start with an idea. That idea is translated into a design, and that design is the basis for development and, eventually, the final game.

A game's design is like a blueprint for a house. You would not consider building a house without a blueprint, and it is an equally bad idea to develop a game without designing it first. The reason for this is to save time and frustration. For larger projects, time wasted also means unnecessary funds are expended.

Imagine that you employed a project team of 12 developers, animators, and artists. If you shared your game idea, would they have enough information to go on? Would they create a great game, but not the game you had in mind? All we are doing with our game design is documenting as much as we can in the beginning so that the development process is purposeful. Without question, you will continually modify your game's design during development, so having a strong base from which to start is critical to your success.

Our game design will serve as the foundation for the look of our game, what the player's objectives are, what the gameplay will be, supporting user actions, animations, audio, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and victory conditions. That is a lot to think about and underscores the importance of translating the game idea into the game design.

Throughout the book, we will be covering a range of components. However, in this section, we will cover those that appear in the following list:

• Game idea
• Input controls
• Winning and losing

So, let's look at each component in more detail.

Game idea

The basic concept of our Super Shooter game is that it will be a 3D game featuring a Futuristic Hero Soldier as the player character. The character must fight against Enemy Soldiers, who are intent on destroying our Hero's base and anyone that gets in their way, including our Hero.

Here is an image of what our game will look like:

Figure 1.1 – Our hero shooting bullets at enemies

Now that we have a general idea of what the game is going to be, let's talk about how the player will control the character.

Input controls

It is important to consider how players will interact with our game. Players have an expectation that the industry norms for user controls will be implemented in games, which is why, for our example, the player will control our Hero using the standard set of controls.

Our default set of user input controls, as shown in the following figure, will consist of the keyboard and mouse:

Figure 1.2 – Controls scheme

We will configure and program our game so that user input from the keyboard matches the key and action pairings shown in the following table:

Figure 1.3 – Key mapping

The mouse will also be a significant source of user input. We will implement two components using the mouse, as indicated in the following table:

Figure 1.4 – Mouse mapping

The left mouse button will be our action button to shoot bullets, while the horizontal mouse motion will allow us to rotate our character and face the enemies. As all enemies and the player are going to be moving across a flat surface, it is not necessary to move the camera up and down.

That's how we handle input, but we also need to end the game session at some point! Let's talk about how the player will win and lose.

Winning and losing

Our winning condition will be when all the Enemy waves have been eliminated.

There will be two different ways the player can lose the game:

• The first losing condition is when the base life becomes 0.
• The second losing condition is if the Hero's life becomes 0.

From this short description, you can tell that there will be several things to keep track of, including the following:

• The number of remaining Waves
• The health of the Player's Base
• The health of our Hero

Now that we have defined what is called the game's core loop (start a level, play it, win/lose it, repeat), let's dive deeper into the specific details, starting with our characters.

Game characters

Our game will feature several objects, but only two game characters. The first game character is our Hero and will be controlled by the player. The second type of game character is the Enemies. They are non-player characters that are controlled by AI. Let's look more closely at both of these characters.

Hero

The player will play our game as the Hero, our game's protagonist. So, what can our Hero player character do? We already know we will be able to move them throughout our game environment using a combination of keyboard and mouse inputs. We also know that the left mouse button—our action button—will cause them to shoot bullets.

Important note

Because the Hero is controlled by a human player, it is referred to as the Player Character.

We will implement the following animations for the Hero:

• Idle: This animation will play when the character is not being mov...