Preface

Hello, future game developers! If you are reading this book, you are probably a curious person trying to learn more about a great game engine—Unity—and specifically, programming in C#. This book will take you on a learning journey. We will go through it together, beginning with the fundamentals of programming and finishing with a functional 2D platform game.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Discovering Your Hidden Scripting Skills and Getting Your Environment Ready, puts you at ease with writing scripts for Unity.

Chapter 2, Introducing the Building Blocks for Unity Scripts, helps you develop the skill of writing your first executable code.

Chapter 3, Getting into the Details of Variables, teaches you about creating and using C# variables, followed editing them in Unity Inspector.

Chapter 4, Getting into the Details of Methods, helps you learn more in detail about methods and how to use them to understand the importance of code blocks and the variables used in them.

Chapter 5, Lists, Arrays, and Dictionaries, introduces slightly more complex ideas of handling, lists, arrays, and dictionaries, which allow you to store many values at once.

Chapter 6, Conditions and Looping, helps you learn how to "ask" Unity to loop through a section of code and do something useful.

Chapter 7, Objects, a Containers with Variables and Methods, pes into the subjects of organizing your code and object-oriented programming.

Chapter 8, Let's Make a Game! – From Idea to Development, shows you how to turn an idea into a ready-to-code project and how to break down complex mechanics into pieces.

Chapter 9, Starting Your First Game, helps us transform an idea into a real Unity project.

Chapter 10, Writing GameManager, gets you acquainted with the basics of the singleton approach and also helps you work through the gameplay loop.

Chapter 11, The Game Level, helps you learn how to create reusable pieces of a level and also how to populate them to create the illusion of an endlessly running game.

Chapter 12, The User Interface, explains how to construct and implement the user interface in our game.

Chapter 13, Collectables — What Next?, focuses on collectables and storing some data between Unity sessions.

What you need for this book

You will definitely need a computer—PC, Mac, or any machine that supports Unity editor installation.

The complete Unity system requirements can be found at this link:

https://unity3d.com/unity/system-requirements

Who this book is for

The book is targeted at beginner-level Unity developers with no prior programming experience. If you are a Unity developer and wish to create games by learning how to write C# scripts or code, then this book is for you.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Add the Collectable script to your coin prefab."

A block of code is set as follows:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class LeaveTrigger : MonoBehaviour {


  void OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider2D other) {

    LevelGenerator.instance.AddPiece();
    LevelGenerator.instance.RemoveOldestPiece();
  }
  
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "When you are ready, click on Play in Unity."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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