Learning 2D Game Development with Unity: A Hands-On Guide to Game Creation

The Unity Engine Tutorial for Any Game Creator

Unity is now the world’s #1 game engine, thanks to its affordability, continuous improvements, and amazing global community. With Unity, you can design, code, and author your game once, and then deploy it to multiple platforms, reaching huge audiences and earning maximum returns. Learning 2D Game Development with Unity® will help you master Unity and build powerful skills for success in today’s game industry. It also includes a bonus rundown of the new GUI tools introduced in Unity’s version 4.6 beta.

With this indispensable guide, you’ll gain a solid, practical understanding of the Unity engine as you build a complete, 2D platform-style game, hands-on. The step-by-step project will get you started fast, whether you’re moving to Unity from other engines or are new to game development.

This tutorial covers the entire development process, from initial concept, plans, and designs to the final steps of building and deploying your game. It illuminates Unity’s newly integrated 2D toolset, covering sprites, 2D physics, game scripts, audio, and animations. Throughout, it focuses on the simplest and lowest-cost approaches to game development, relying on free software and assets. Everything you’ll need is provided.

Register your book at informit.com/title/9780321957726 to access assets, code listings, and video tutorials on the companion website.

Learn How To

• Set up your Unity development environment and navigate its tools
• Create and import assets and packages you can add to your game
• Set up game sprites and create atlas sheets using the new Unity 2D tools
• Animate sprites using keyframes, animation controllers, and scripting
• Build a 2D game world from beginning to end
• Establish player control
• Construct movements that “feel right”
• Set up player physics and colliders
• Create and apply classic gameplay systems
• Implement hazards and tune difficulty
• Apply audio and particle effects to the game
• Create intuitive game menus and interface elements
• Debug code and provide smooth error handling
• Organize game resources and optimize game performance
• Publish your game to the web for others to see and play

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Setting Up the Unity Development Environment
Chapter 2 Understanding Asset Creation
Chapter 3 Creating 2D Sprites
Chapter 4 Building the Game World
Chapter 5 The Basics of Movement and Player Control
Chapter 6 Adding Animations to Our Scene
Chapter 7 Setting Up Player Physics and Colliders
Chapter 8 Creating and Applying Gameplay Systems
Chapter 9 Creating Hazards and Crafting Difficulty
Chapter 10 Creating the Menus and Interface Elements
Chapter 11 Applying Effects to the GameObjects
Chapter 12 Organization and Optimization
Chapter 13 Bringing It All Together
Chapter 14 UGUI
Appendix: JavaScript Code Samples