Getting Started with Unity 5: Leverage the power of Unity 5 to create amazing 3D games

by Edward Lavieri

Leverage the power of Unity 5 to create amazing 3D gamesAbout This BookLearn to create interactive games with the Unity 5 game engineExplore advanced features of Unity 5 to help make your games more appealing and successfulA step-by-step guide giving you the perfect start to developing games with Unity 5Who This Book Is ForIf you are a game developer interested in learning Unity 3D from scratch and becoming familiar with its core features, then this book is for you. No prior knowledge of Unity 3D is required.

What You Will LearnCreate, organize, and manage your game project with the Unity interfaceDevelop a 3D game environment with a custom terrain, water, sky, mountains, and treesImport and use custom assets and asset packages to add characters to your gameReview existing animations and create custom animation clips to bring your game characters to lifeBuild custom scripts to make your game characters interactiveAdd a graphical user interface to your game to enable easy user interactionExplore advanced Unity concepts including workflow, scaling, physics, and cross-platform considerationsCustomize your game with sound effects, shadows, lighting effects, and rendering optionsIn DetailThis book will guide you through the entire process of creating a 3D game, from downloading the Unity game engine to publishing your game.

Beginning with an overview of the Unity engine and its interface, you will walk through the process of creating a game environment and learn how to use built-in assets as well as assets created with third-party 3D modeling tools such as Blender.

Moving on, you will create your very own animation clips from within Unity and learn scripting in Unity. You will master exciting concepts including mini-mapping, the game navigation system, sound effects, shadows, and light effects. By the end of the book, you'll have learned advanced topics such as cross-platform considerations that enable your games to run on every platform.

186 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 29, 2015

Reviews

[Fish · Rating 1 out of 5]

While a lot of the setup and asset interaction is good and important, the C# is shockingly bad. Incredibly poor coding practices, very inefficient scripting (e.g. functions unnecessarily running every frame update), and even fundamentally unintuitive game design decisions make this a strange read.

Poor and inconsistent naming conventions both in the scripts and in filenames, severely lacking coverage of basic UI element positioning, questionable advice on project organization, and a lack of any real depth make this a poor replacement for the freely available and excellent tutorials Unity provides for beginners on its website.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've begun to play around with Unity recently, but I found it difficult to work out how the Terrain generation worked. So I was very pleased when this opened with step by step instructions of how to generate a map with mountains, trees and a river. It guides you through making a simple farming game, collecting a few resources and feeding your animals. The gameplay is very simplistic and I don't think it does that great at teaching you the C# scripting side of things; but I already understood that anyway. There's some aspects at the end of the book that just seem tacked on (e.g. Performance Profiling) and I think the main content could have been fleshed out more; It is a short book after-all.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives a basic overview of just that - the basics. You can get a simple game set up and working with plenty of opportunity to add on more at a later time. C# is covered for the coding language and particle systems has a brief overview in the final chapter. Overall, this was a great refresher for me to get back into working with Unity.

[Kris · Rating 1 out of 5]

stopped reading at page 79