Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide: Absolute beginners to designing games for Android will find this book is their passport to quick results. Lots of handholding and practical exercises using Unity 3D makes learning a breeze.

Thomas James Finnegan

Dec 2013 · Packt Publishing Ltd

About this ebook

Absolute beginners to designing games for Android will find this book is their passport to quick results. Lots of handholding and practical exercises using Unity 3D makes learning a breeze.Key Features

• Enter the increasingly popular mobile market and create games using Unity 3D and Android
• Learn optimization techniques for efficient mobile games
• Clear, step-by-step instructions for creating a complete mobile game experience

Book DescriptionPowerful and continuing to grow, the mobile market has never been bigger and more demanding of great games. Android continues to prove itself as a strong contender in this challenging market. With Unity 3D, great games can be made for Android quickly and easily. With its great deployment system, the Android platform is now only one click away. Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide dives straight into making real, fully-functional games, with hands-on examples and step-by-step instructions to give you a firm grounding in Unity 3D and Android. Everything necessary for creating a complete gaming experience is covered and detailed throughout the course of this book. Using clear and practical examples that progressively build upon each other, this book guides you through the process of creating games in Unity for Android. Start by learning about all the great features that Unity and Android have to offer. Next, create a Tic-Tac-Toe game while learning all about interfaces. After that, learn about meshes, materials, and animations with the creation of a tank battle game. You will then learn how to expand your game's environment with the addition of shadows and a skybox. Adding on this, you will also learn how to expand the tank battle by creating enemies and using path finding to chase the player. Next, explore touch and tilt controls with the creation of a space fighter game. Then, learn about physics while recreating the most popular mobile game on the market. You will then expand the space fighter game with the addition of all the special effects that make a game great. Finally, complete your experience by learning the optimization techniques required to keep your games running smoothly. While Unity is available for both Mac and Windows, the book is presented working from a Windows environment. Programming in Unity is possible in C#, JavaScript, and Boo. This book will be working in C# and the final projects will be provided in C# and JavaScript. From nothing to a fully-featured mobile game, Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide takes you through everything it takes to create your next game for the Android platform.What you will learn

• Set up a development environment to work with both Unity and Android
• Import and work with the basic building blocks of a game: meshes, materials, and animations
• Utilize particles and sound effects to provide feedback to the player
• Adjust camera effects and game logic to create 2D games
• Interface with touch and tilt inputs to create custom control systems
• Set up path finding to create intelligently moving characters
• Successfully create custom graphical interfaces
• Set up and utilize physics to create a mobile game classic
• Create dynamically lit scenes using lightmaps
• Understand the best choices for optimizing a game for the mobile platform

Who this book is for

Great for developers new to Unity, Android, or both, this book will walk you through everything you need to know about game development for the Android mobile platform. No experience with programming, Android, or Unity is required. Most of the assets used in each chapter project are provided with the book, but it is assumed that you have some access to basic image and model creation software. You will also need access to an Android powered device.

Ratings and reviews

I've read beginner-level books that were FAR easier to understand. The author provides code snippets without showing the entire class of code which leaves the user confused in places. When reviewing the author's source code, it's only provided in its COMPLETED form (meaning, it includes all of the chronological changes through the chapters) so the user is only left to try deciphering where they went wrong in their own code with no reference. Absolutely unacceptable and I've requested a refund. This book wasn't even worth the $20 I paid because I was lost and confused immediately in the first game. Unity continued to give me error messages, even though my code matched the book's exactly. Because the shorthand was explained briefly, users have no additional knowledge to help them debug their code and resolve errors. Didn't even look further into the book. I felt like I was playing a guessing game for why I was receiving errors vs actually learning anything.

About the author

Thomas Finnegan completed his graduati on from Brown College in 2010. Since then, he has worked on everything from mobile platf orms to web development, and even experimental devices. He now works as a freelance game developer. Past clients include Carmichael Lynch, Coleco, and Subaru. His most recent project is Batt le Box 3D, a virtual table top. Currently he is teaching game development at the Minneapolis Media Insti tute in Minnesota.