3D Game Development with Unity

Franz Lanzinger

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367349219
• eBook ISBN: 9781000547733
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This book teaches beginners and aspiring game developers how to develop 3D games with Unity. Thousands of commercial games have been built with Unity. This book combines a practical, step-by-step approach with explanations of the underlying theory that are reinforced with hundreds of screenshots and several larger projects.

Building on the knowledge developed in 2D Game Development for Unity, this book uses the Blender software for 3D modelling and texturing, GIMP for 2D art, Audacity for sound effects, and MuseScore for music composition and notation. Readers can follow the step-by-step guides and create an introductory racing game, a 3D maze game, and a 3D FPS adventure game as they progress through the chapters. The book contains numerous color illustrations and online access to easily downloadable game assets, code, and project files.

Written to be accessible and easy to follow, this book will be a valuable resource to both beginner and aspiring game developers that want to develop 3D games with Unity.

Franz Lanzinger is an independent game developer, author, and pianist. He is the owner of Lanzinger Studio located in Sunnyvale, California. His game development career spans almost 40 years starting with the coin-op classic Crystal Castles at Atari in 1983, continuing with Ms. Pacman and Toobin' for the NES, published by Tengen in 1990.

Franz has been an indie game developer since 1991. He worked on SNES Rampart, Championship Pool, and NCAA Final Four Basketball, as well as Gubble for the PC, Mac, and PlayStation. This is Franz's third book about game development. He is currently working on a remaster of Gubble. In his spare time, he is the piano accompanist for the Valley Chorale and the Serendipity Choir. Go to franzlanzinger.com for the latest news about Franz as well as resources for his books.

I Basics of 3D Game Development

Chapter 1 Software Tools

DOI: 10.1201/9780429328725-2

In this chapter you’ll install the principal software tools used in this book and test them out to make sure that they run: Visual Studio, Unity, GIMP, Blender, and Audacity. In the following chapter you’ll use these tools to make a small 3D game. You’ll continue to use these tools throughout this book. Later on in this book you’ll install MuseScore for music composition and notation. Your main hub for all of this will be Unity.

This book was written to let you follow along with a series of steps. By doing so you will experience firsthand what it’s like to be a game developer. There are hundreds of numbered steps in this book, requiring you to pay very close attention and to do them in order, one by one. Most of the steps are followed by additional explanations, descriptions, or screen shots.

When coding, making just the wrong kind of mistake can have devastating consequences for your project. The devastation can occur immediately, but if you’re unlucky it’ll be days, months, or even years later. This is the nature of the beast. Some mistakes can come to haunt you decades later. Really. The best way to avoid this painful embarrassment is to test early and often. Type carefully, and make very sure that you don’t skip any steps. If you only have a few bugs along the way, you’ll be doing better than most. Simply accept that this will happen to you, and when it does, fix the problem, learn from it, and move on.

Your Computers

You’ll need to have access to a PC or Mac to follow along with the steps in this book. Your system needs to meet the development system requirements for Unity. In the spring of 2021, the Unity company released the 2020.3.0f1 LTS version of Unity, the version used for this book. LTS stands for long-term support, which means Unity will support this version for 2 years, fixing bugs but not changing it otherwise. So, you should be OK when using the latest version of 2020 LTS Unity, for example, 2020.3.3f1. Here is a summary of the system requirements for 2020 LTS:

• OS: Windows 7 SP1+, Windows 10, 64-bit versions only; or macOS High Sierra 10.13+.
• CPU: X64 architecture with SSE2 instruction set support.
• DX10-, DX11-, and DX12-capable GPUs. For Macs Metal-capable Intel and AMD GPUs.

Look at unity.com for details. It’s in the Unity Manual under System requirements for 2020.3. While not strictly necessary, it’s highly recommended that your screen has at least 1920x1080 resolution. Some laptops or older desktop systems might have lower native resolutions. If that is your situation you should seriously consider upgrading or replacing your display. You should probably get at least one 4K monitor because many of your players will have one. A two or three monitor setup with a fairly recent graphics card is recommended in order to maximize your game development productivity and enjoyment. If you don’t have multiple monitors, Virtual Desktops in Windows and Mission Control on your Mac are very useful and workable alternatives. If you wish to support real-time ray tracing in your project, then search the web for high-end graphics cards or laptops that support real-time ray tracing and get one. Yes, they are expensive as of 2022, but prices are decreasing, and availability is improving. This book contains an optional section on ray tracing in the lighting chapter (Chapter 21).

If your system meets the requirements for Unity, it will be more than adequate for the other software tools used in this book. And yes, you really should have fast internet access. If you don’t know the speed of your internet connection, this would be a good time to find out. Run a speed test and check that your download speed is at least 10 Megabits per second, the faster the better. 30 Megabits per second is recommended for an enjoyable experience. Some of your downloads will be large and time consuming, but once everything is downloaded and installed, you’ll be able to work on your project with slow or even no internet access. In case you’re curious, the author uses a three-monitor setup with a 75 Mbit internet connection.

This book assumes that you have a three-button mouse and a numpad. There are workarounds but your life will be much easier if you connect these devices to your system when needed.

Most serious game developers have access to several systems, old and new, laptops and desktops, maybe even both PCs and Macs. Really old systems may not be compatible with Unity development, but they can sometimes be used for doing Visual Studio projects or for the creation of graphics, sound, or music. They may also be good enough for testing your games, so by all means, keep your old systems if you can deal with storing them and keeping them updated. It’s important to test your games on a variety of systems before releasing them to the public and to your external testers.

As stated in the title, this book focuses on the development of 3D games for PCs and Macs. If you’re interested in developing non-game applications, this book may also be for you. Unity got its name from its ability to allow for the creation of games once and to then deploy them to many targets such as desktops, consoles, and mobile devices. An early slogan for Unity was “Author once – deploy everywhere.” That was and still is a noble sentiment, though in reality it’s somewhat more complicated than that. All games in this book will run on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Introduction and Overview
• Part I Basics of 3D Game Development
• Part II A 3D Adventure
• Appendix I: The C# Coding Standard for this Book
• Appendix II: Game Development Checklist
• Index