Unity Game Development Essentials

I don’t read tutorial books. For learning new I simply start building something and learn by try and fail –method. Because of my human brains when I’m enjoining I’m motivated and consequently learn easily.

I also get bored. Change must be constant and therefor I decided to shift the learning pattern when Mr. Rohit Shetty from Packt Publishing asked me to do a book review.

Unity Game Development Essentials written by Will Goldstone is a book for getting on track with Unity3D. Unity is a program for creating 3D games to web browsers, OSX, Windows, Wii and iPhone. Mr. Goldstone goes through each of the main gadgets in Unity and does it in a way the learner cannot drop out.

Coherently all starts from the concept of 3D programming and move on to the creation of environment. Character is brought to life and given ability to interact with the world. Tasks are introduced to the player and motivation is generated. Stuff gets physical behaviors and starts to react with the player. World gets fancier with Particle Systems and suddenly everything turns into a real game.

During this journey all the buttons and switches of the Unity are learned. Topics like Collision detection, Ray casting, Physics engine, Particle engine and Rigidbodies becomes familiar. The little coding all this take is made with JavaScript. I call it a little coding since I’m from world of a lot coding.

The book has a clear layout, enough images and coding is rational. Everything is simple as can be and that’s only a good thing. Still I was hoping introductions to get more under the hood. When someone is using a tool for few years they always realize unobvious tricks. Maybe in next book?

Reading and doing all the chapters is not entirely waste of time even if you’re advanced developer. You’ll learn where and what for every dropdowns and buttons are. Also many of the core classes of Unity are extensively introduced. I’m positive that this book could turn many of the non-programmers into path of programming.

Praises and whines

I found nothing really bad to say about the book since it does what it promises and does it in a very didactic way. Scripting isn’t pedant OOP, but that’s not the main content of this book. Book is all about learning the UI and use of the most essential classes.

I have some concerns about the scripting Unity on OSX. I have spent hours for finding solutions to the question “How to get code completion and hinting work with Unity3D?”.

There are many poor proposals on Unity forums like using VMWare and MS Visual Studio, TextMate or MonoDevelop. This book won’t help on this issue either.

I don’t want to use two operating systems. Also the work flow of “individually introduce every class to editor” is idiotic. The Textmates code completion is primitive and MonoDevelop is buggy. Unitys own Unitron is as good as the simple text editor. I want things to work as they do in Eclipse.

If I could check what classes contains with dot-mark and get the completion by keyboard sort cut this blog would contain Unity demos. I take for granted the ability to create new classes in script editor, import packages and use their methods in that moment with documentation. It’s waste of brainpower to memorize class names and methods not to mention writing every letter. This is a serious issue with Unity3D and keeps me out of that scene. Please let me know if you know a solution to this.

Unity3D has the advantage of GPU acceleration and there for interesting today for web developers. Creating games using its standard components is efficient. Also the ability to build for iPhone is a plus. To give indie version for free was the smartest move from Unity Technologies. It generates developers and eventually companies (=customers). To gain developers like me the scripting tools must be from this century.

After the book

You won’t be a master after reading this book. It takes a lot more then that but you’ll get a good start. You can do a lot with Unity3D without scripting and for some that might sound a good thing, but it’s not. You cannot do more then basic without coding but it’s always better to do something then nothing no matter how you do it. I’m sure that Unity’s team will fix the issues of scripting at some point.

I recommend this book to everyone who’s newbie to Unity3D and desire to get into it. Personally I’m not that interested until I found a proper scripting tool and work flow.