Unity 3.x Scripting

07/19/2012 · No Responses

Unity is a powerful tool for anyone who aspires to build interesting and sellable games. One of the exciting aspects of Unity is how easily it can be extended to build custom characters and game environments. Scripting is the key to accomplish all this, but it comes with a steep learning curve.

This book will teach you everything you need to know about scripting in Unity. It will take you through creating, including and tweaking scripts for achieving various tasks. Some of these tasks include controlling characters, animations, controlling objects, handling game data and enemy AI.

The book will begin by building scripts for simple tasks and continue to develop them for increasing level of difficulty. The first few chapters include scripting to build a custom game environment and creating characters and controlling them. Arranging camera views, controlling and creating animations are covered in the next set of chapters.

The book then moves on to build objects, animate them and code character interaction with them and create inventories where the characters can pick ammo, health and other such objects. Towards the end, the book teaches how to add background sound and discusses basic enemy AI scripting.

What you will learn from this book

Use available scripts that readers can use to create default character controller
Attach default character controller scripts to an existing game object
Set-up your own camera and character controller rigs through code
Code dynamic and static objects like bio gun, ammo, health, character stat augmentation, treasure chests and make your character interact with them
Create character item slots along with inventories, where players will be able to drag and drop different item icons in the inventory slots
Attach existing animation scripts to characters and objects and create new ones
Assign and equip selected items on a player or object, making them active and useable like adding fire functionality to a bio gun
Create and maintain scores to control character objectives and save game data
Setup a system to control transition between scenes and transferring objects from one scene to another along with instantiation for characters
Deal with 2D and 3D parallax backgrounds
Create an audio game controller to fix sound overlapping and create background audio stems
Basics of enemy AI, such as path-finding and creating distinct enemy behavior and their awareness

Approach
The book is written in an easy to understand step-by-step style. It covers real-world examples for every topic, so that you gain most out of the book and are able to apply these techniques straight into your game.

Who this book is for
If you are a programmer interested in developing games using Unity and want to customize your game by writing scripts, then this is a book for you. To make the best use of this book, you will have to know your way around Unity. The book is ideal for someone, who has experience in building games using Unity and knows a bit of programming; especially JavaScript. However, if you are a programmer in any other language, you should be able to grasp the book fairly easily.