Hands-On Game Development without Coding

Create 2D and 3D games with Visual Scripting in Unity

Lucas Bertolini

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789537987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Programmierung von Spielen

Develop your own games with Unity 2D/3D Game Kit and use it for your presentations, kids education, level design, game design, proofs of concept, or even just for fun!

Key Features

• Build your first ever video game using Unity 2D/3D Game kit
• Learn how to create game levels, adding props, giving behaviours to objects and working on gameplay
• Step by step instructions on creating your own AI enemy and interacting with it

Book Description

Hands-On Game Development without Coding is the first Visual Scripting book in the market. It was tailor made for a non programing audience who are wondering how a videogame is made.

After reading this book you will be able to develop your own 2d and 3d videogames and use it on your presentations, to speed up your level design deliveries, test your game design ideas, work on your proofs of concept, or even doing it just for fun.

The best thing about Hands-On Game Development without Coding is that you don't need any previous knowledge to read and understand the process of creating a videogame. It is our main focus to provide you with the opportunity to create a videogame as easy and fast as possible.

Once you go through the book, you will be able to create player input interaction, levels, object behaviours, enemy AI, creating your own UI and finally giving life to your game by building it.

It's Alive!

What you will learn

• Understanding the Interface and kit flow.
• Comprehend the virtual space and its rules.
• Learning the behaviours and roles each component must have in order to make a videogame.
• Learn about videogame development
• Creating a videogame without the need of learning any programming language
• Create your own gameplay HUD to display player and Enemy information

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who is interested in becoming a game developer but do not posses any coding experience or programming skills. All you need is a computer and basic software interface knowledge.

Basic Concepts - Variables and Components

Unity 2D and 3D have many things to offer, but at the beginning this can be a little overwhelming. This is why I want to take we step by step through these in order to show we what they are used for and when is the right time to use one tool or another.

Once we finish with this chapter, it will be easy to use Game Kit items and objects, and use them accordingly, depending on what we need. In addition to this, we will have a better understanding of the components that Unity and Unity 2D and 3D Game Kits provide.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Visual Scripting
• Data types and data visualization
• Objects and components

Visual Scripting

We are taking our first steps in this Visual Scripting video game development story, but we never stop for a moment to think why we call it Visual Scripting and how it works.

If we think about the term Visual Scripting, we can think of it as the action of writing a script with our vision, but of course that makes no sense.

Visual Scripting is usually considered the act of creating a program using a summation of different small programs interacting with each other. There are different tools for Visual Scripting, which focus on reducing the difficulty of creating a program.

With these tools, the crafting of a program happens through an interface, and as a result of this, the user doesn't need to code, but instead has to click, drag, and drop. This is the reason it is considered to be visual interaction with the tool, hence the term Visual Scripting.

These tools, and the concept of Visual Scripting itself, targets animators, game designers, level designers, and artists who are looking to test their creation the way their users will see it.

Of course, the scalability of this is not as great as coding the script ourselves. The more complex the features we want to create, the less chance there is to do it without writing any actual code. But if we want to stick to this in order to create not-so-complex games, this is our chance to do so quickly and easily.

In order to understand the concept of Visual Scripting, we will look at a quick demonstration.

In the Project View, go to Assets | 2DGameKit | Scenes | Gameplay and open Zone3 by double-clicking on it:

Click on Play and take a look at Ellen's life hearts, at the top left. There are five of them, right? Now, exit Play mode and click on the Ellen GameObject, and then open the Damageable component. we will see that the Starting Health variable is set to 5, as we can see in the below image.

Let's say we would like an easier game, and therefore decide to give the player more lives. we would just have to change the value of that variable. So, click on it and change it to 10. That's it, our player now has 10 lives:

Data types and data visualization

In Unity3D, as well as many other game engines, data can be represented in many ways, but this kind of information is mostly used by programmers. This is the reason we will detail a list of data types and how they are represented in Unity. This will help you communicate in future conversations with fellow programmers.

We will go through the main data types, but there are many others used in Unity:

• Choices: Choices are usually represented by enums in the editor. This gives you the option to choose between a predefined set of options:

• Text: Text is represented with a string in the editor. By clicking on the label and writing something, we will have the opportunity to show that text to the user:

• Numbers: Numbers are represente...