Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4: All-in-one, multi-platform game development

by Sue Blackman

Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity?is perfect for those who would like to?come to grips with programming Unity. You may be an artist who has learned 3D tools such as 3ds Max, Maya, or Cinema 4D, or you may come from 2D tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator. On the other hand, you may just want to familiarize yourself with programming games and the latest ideas in game production. This book introduces key game production concepts in an artist-friendly way, and rapidly teaches the basic scripting skills you'll need with Unity. It goes on to show how you, as an independent game artist, can create casual interactive adventure games in the style of Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island, while also giving you a firm foundation in game logic and design. The first part of the book explains the logic involved in game interaction, and soon has you creating game assets through simple examples that you can build upon and gradually expand. In the second part, you'll build the foundations of a point-and-click style first-person adventure game?including reusable state management scripts, load/save functionality, a robust inventory system, and a bonus feature: a dynamically configured maze and mini-map. With the help of the provided 2D and 3D content, you'll learn to evaluate and deal with challenges in bite-sized pieces as the project progresses, gaining valuable problem-solving skills in interactive design.

Genres: Programming

831 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2013

Reviews

[Xianshun Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The books is primarily for point-and-click adventure game and goes in length to describes the various of this game genre's development in Unity game engine. It has lots of instructions about how to perform various tasks of a point-and-click adventure game development in Unity game engine. On the other hand, the book is too long and a bit long-winded for my taste. While the coding and development is not difficult to understand, they are not very concise. To my personal taste, the javascript codes in the book do not provide very well encapsulated OOP. Some parts of the scripts are simply too long-winded and do not need to be explained for me (as they are quite easy to understand with a simple example, but sometimes take 20 or 30 pages), which i feel it is really costly for someone attention span when what one does need is just a quick understanding. The book tries to be comprehensive and squeeze most of stuffs of an adventure game development into its content, but many of the parts are just not necessary to go through and make the book feel more like a manual. Maybe they are good for some readers as reference. The book give me a good opportunity to learn the generic and legacy animation though.