Getting Started with Unity

by Patrick Felicia

Getting Started with Unity

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Alexander Tarlinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok. This was my first book on Unity, so maybe I'm overly optimistic in my review, but I really liked the book. It basically show you how to create a relatively complete, simple 3D game with zombies. What I rally liked was that the book introduces a broad variety of different concepts in just roughly 150 pages. You get an initial overview of various aspects of Unity game development, and you build a non-trivial game.

[Browncoat Jayson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guide starts off as one might expect from an introductory book by talking about how to download, install, and use the Unity package. However, I would have expected quite a few tips and tricks for navigating within Unity; it took me several hours to be comfortable with its nuances. This book describes all of the parts of the interface, the navigation, and its functions in four and a half pages. The remainder of the chapter describes how to create a scene, how to add objects to the scene, applying a texture, adding a light, and adding a controller. All of these are great steps, but are just covered too briefly to really wrap your head around, especially if you are new to game development.

The unique part of this guide is that each chapter, from two to six, walk you through creating a simplistic game. Along the way, you learn how to import objects (downloaded from various sites, or included in the companion code) and set them in the scene, add colliders, add scripts for various functions (from playing audio to collecting objects and displaying them in an inventory system), adding enemies, including simple AI, tracking damage and ammunition, and combining multiple scenes together into a working game. This is amazing, as you can see the game take shape as you work through the materials. All of the code examples are JavaScript, which has a lower barrier for entry than C# or Boo scripts, which means they are more easily adaptable.

There are a few downsides, unfortunately. All of the code is very simplistic, and would need to be completely replaced in a fully working game. Its reliance on publicly available assets is also a liability; it directs you to download textures from CGTextures, audio from FreeSound and Incompetech, and the "companion code" from the author's own Wordpress site, some of which are already defunct. Thankfully the downloads are still available directly from Packt, and alternative assets can be acquired at the same sites.

Unfortunately, most of what is in this book is easily available for free on the Internet. However, the author does make it interesting by slowing building up a playable, albeit simple, game. I give it a 3/5 for a brand new user, with the advice that anyone who knows their way around any game development package skip it in favor of a more intermediate guide.

[Alina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps for someone who is completely new to Unity and a beginner to coding would appreciate this book, since it's very much a step-by-step instruction of one game. However, I think that newbies might have an easier time following Youtube videos and/or the official Unity tutorials since this book lacked guiding pictures for someone unfamiliar with the UI of Unity.

Also, it should be noted that this book is fairly obsolete by this point, especially since Unity will no longer offer support for version 4.6 at the end of December 2015.

[Alvaro Tejada Galindo · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book and first experience with Unity3D...the book is really good...great actually...but sadly...outdated -:( For most of the scripting I need to Google a lot and try-fail-fix...

I recommend the book anyway as it is a great way to start working with Unity -:)