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In this article by Wajahat Karim, author of the book Mastering Android Game Development with Unity, we will be creating addictive fun games by using a very famous game engine called Unity3D.

In this article, we will cover the following topics:

  • Game engines and Unity3D
  • Features of Unity3D
  • Basics of Unity game development

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Game engines and Unity3D

A game engine is a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games. Many tools and frameworks are available for game designers and developers to code a game quickly and easily without building from the ground up. As time passed by, game engines became more mature and easy for developers, with feature-rich environments. Starting from native code frameworks for Android such as AndEngine, Cocos2d-x, LibGDX, and so on, game engines started providing clean user interfaces and drag-drop functionalities to make game development easier for developers. These engines include lots of tools which are different in user interface, features, porting, and many more things; but all have one thing in common— they create video games in the end.

Unity (http://unity3d.com) is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies. It made its first public announcement at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005, and supported only game development for Mac OS, but since then it has been extended to target more than 15 platforms for desktop, mobile, and consoles. It is notable for its one-click ability to port games on multiple platforms including BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8, Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Unity Web Player (including Facebook), Adobe Flash, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U, and Wii.

Unity has a fantastic interface, which lets the developers manage the project really efficiently from the word go. It has a nice drag-drop functionality with connecting behavior scripts written in either C#, JavaScript (or UnityScript), or Boo to define the custom logic and functionality with visual objects quite easily. Unity has been proven quite easy to learn for new developers who are just starting out with game development. Now more largely studios have also started using , and that too for good reasons.

Unity is one of those engines that provide support for both 2D and 3D games without putting developers in trouble or confusing them. Due to its popularity all over the game development industry, it has a vast collection of online tutorials, great documentation, and a very helping community of developers.

Features of Unity3D

Unity is a game development ecosystem comprising a powerful rendering engine, intuitive tools, rapid workflows for 2D and 3D games, all-in-one deployment support, and thousands of already created free and paid assets with a helping developer’s community. The feature list includes the following:

  • Easy workflow allowing developers to rapidly assemble scenes in an intuitive editor workspace
  • Quality game creation like AAA visuals, high-definition audio, full-throttle action without any glitches on screen
  • Dedicated tools for both 2D and 3D game creation with shared conventions to make it easy for developers
  • A very unique and flexible animation system to create natural animations with very less time-consuming efforts
  • Smooth frame rate with reliable performance on all the platforms where developers publish their games
  • One-click ability to deploy to all platforms from desktops, browsers, and mobiles to consoles within minutes
  • Reduces time of development by using already created reusable assets available at the huge asset store

Basics of Unity game development

Before delving into details of Unity3D and game development concepts, let’s have a look at some of the very basics of Unity 5.0. We will go through the Unity interface, menu items, using assets, creating scenes, and publishing builds.

Unity editor interface

When you launch Unity 5.0 for the first time, you will be presented with an editor with a few panels on the left, right, and bottom of the screen. The following screenshot shows the editor interface when it’s first launched:

Fig 1.7 Unity 5 editor interface at first launch

First of all, take your time to look over the editor, and become a little familiar with it. The Unity editor is divided into different small panels and views, which can be dragged to customize the workspace according to the developer/designer’s needs. Unity 5 comes with some prebuilt workspace layout templates, which can be selected from the Layout drop-down menu at top-right corner of the screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

Fig 1.8 Unity 5 editor layouts

The layout currently displayed in the editor shown in the preceding screenshot is the Default layout. You can select these layouts, and see how the editor’s interface changes, and how the different panels are placed at different positions in each layout. This book uses the 2 by 3 workspace layout for the whole game. The following figure shows the 2 by 3 workspace with the names of the views and panels highlighted:

Fig 1.9 Unity 5 2 by 3 Layout with views and panel names

As you can see in the preceding figure, the Unity editor contains different views and panels. Every panel and view have a specific purpose, which is described as follows:

Scene view

The Scene view is the whole stage for the game development, and it contains every asset in the game from a tiny point to any heavy 3D model. The Scene view is used to select and position environments, characters, enemies, the player, camera, and all other objects which can be placed on the stage for the game. All those objects which can be placed and shown in the game are called game objects. The Scene view allows developers to manipulate game objects such as selecting, scaling, rotating, deleting, moving, and so on. It also provides some controls such as navigation and transformation.

 In simple words, the Scene view is the interactive sandbox for developers and designers.

Game view

The Game view is the final representation of how your game will look when published and deployed on the target devices, and it is rendered from the cameras of the scene. This view is connected to the play mode navigation bar in the center at the top of the whole Unity workspace. The play mode navigation bar is shown in the following: figure.

Fig 1.14 Play mode bar

When the game is played in the editor, this control bar gets changed to blue color. A very interesting feature of Unity is that it allows developers to pause the game and code while running, and the developers can see and change the properties, transforms, and much more at runtime, without recompiling the whole game, for quick workflow.

Hierarchy view

The Hierarchy view is the first point to select or handle any game object available in the scene. This contains every game object in the current scene. It is tree-type structure, which allows developers to utilize the parent and child concept on the game objects easily. The following figure shows a simple Hierarchy view:

Fig 1.16 Hierarchy view

Project browser panel

This panel looks like a view, but it is called the Project browser panel. It is an embedded files directory in Unity, and contains all the files and folders included in the game project. The following figure shows a simple Project browser panel:

Fig 1.17 Project browser panel

The left side of the panel shows a hierarchal directory, while the rest of the panel shows the files, or, as they are called, assets in Unity. Unity represents these files with different icons to differentiate these according to their file types. These files can be sprite images, textures, model files, sounds, and so on. You can search any specific file by typing in the search text box. On the right side of search box, there are button controls for further filters such as animation files, audio clip files, and so on.

An interesting thing about the Project browser panel is that if any file is not available in the Assets, then Unity starts looking for it on the Unity Asset Store, and presents you with the available free and paid assets.

Inspector panel

This is the most important panel for development in Unity. Unity structures the whole game in the form of game objects and assets. These game objects further contain components such as transform, colliders, scripts, meshes, and so on. Unity lets developers manage these components of each game object through the Inspector panel. The following figure shows a simple Inspector panel of a game object:

Fig 1.18 Inspector panel

These components vary in types, for example, Physics, Mesh, Effects, Audio, UI, and so on. These components can be added in any object by selecting it from the Component menu. The following figure shows the Component menu:

Fig 1.19 Components menu

Summary

In this article, you learned about game engines, such as Unity3D, which is used to create games for Android devices. We also discussed the important features of Unity along with the basics of its development environment.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

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