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Joseph Hocking

Joe Hocking

Unity in Action: Multiplatform Game Development in C# with Unity 5 1st Edition

by Joe Hocking (Author)

4.4 115 ratings

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Unity in Action, Third Edition: Multiplatform game development in C#
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Summary

Unity in Action teaches you how to write and deploy games. You'll master the Unity toolset from the ground up, adding the skills you need to go from application coder to game developer. Based on Unity version 5.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Book

This book helps readers build successful games with the Unity game development platform. You will use the powerful C# language, Unity's intuitive workflow tools, and a state-of-the-art rendering engine to build and deploy mobile, desktop, and console games. Unity's single codebase approach minimizes inefficient switching among development tools and concentrates your attention on making great interactive experiences.

Unity in Action teaches you how to write and deploy games. You'll master the Unity toolset from the ground up, adding the skills you need to go from application coder to game developer. Each sample project illuminates specific Unity features and game development strategies. As you read and practice, you'll build up a well-rounded skill set for creating graphically driven 2D and 3D game applications.

You'll need to know how to program, in C# or a similar OO language. No previous Unity experience or game development knowledge is assumed.

What's Inside

Program characters that run, jump, and interact
Build code architectures that manage the game's state
Connect your games to the internet to download live data
Deploy games to platforms including web and mobile
Covers Unity 5

About the Author

Joe Hocking is a software engineer specializing in interactive media development. He works for Synapse Games and teaches classes in game development at Columbia College Chicago.

Table of Contents

PART 1 FIRST STEPS
Getting to know Unity
Building a demo that puts you in 3D space
Adding enemies and projectiles to the 3D game
Developing graphics for your game
PART 2 GETTING COMFORTABLE
Building a Memory game using Unity's new 2D functionality
Putting a 2D GUI in a 3D game
Creating a third-person 3D game: player movement and animation
Adding interactive devices and items within the game
PART 3 STRONG FINISH
Connecting your game to the internet
Playing audio: sound effects and music
Putting the parts together into a complete game
Deploying your game to players' devices

ISBN-10

161729232X
ISBN-13

978-1617292323
Edition

1st
Publisher

Manning Publications
Publication date

July 7, 2015
Language

English
Dimensions

7 x 1 x 9 inches
Print length

352 pages
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From the Publisher

About this Book

This is a book about programming games in Unity. Think of it as an intro to Unity for experienced programmers. The goal of this book is straightforward: to take people who have some programming experience but no experience with Unity and teach them how to develop a game using Unity.

The best way of teaching development is through example projects, with students learning by doing, and that’s the approach this book takes. I’ll present topics as steps toward building sample games, and you’ll be encouraged to build these games in Unity while exploring the book. We’ll go through a selection of different projects every few chapters, rather than one monolithic project developed over the entire book; sometimes other books take the 'one monolithic project' approach, but that can make it hard to jump into the middle if the early chapters aren’t relevant to you.

This book will have more rigorous programming content than most Unity books (especially beginners’ books). Unity is often portrayed as a list of features with no programming required, which is a misleading view that won’t teach people what they need to know in order to produce commercial titles.

Don’t worry about the exact programming language; C# is used throughout this book, but skills from other languages will transfer quite well. Although the first half of the book will take its time introducing new concepts and will carefully and deliberately step you through developing your first game in Unity, the remaining chapters will move a lot faster in order to take readers through projects in multiple game genres. The book will end with a chapter describing deployment to various platforms like the web and mobile, but the main thrust of the book won’t make any reference to the ultimate deployment target because Unity is wonderfully platform-agnostic.

As for other aspects of game development, extensive coverage of art disciplines would water down how much the book can cover and would be largely about software external to Unity (for example, the animation software used). Discussion of art tasks will be limited to aspects specific to Unity or that all game developers should know. (Note, though, that there is an appendix about modeling custom objects.)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joe Hocking is a software engineer specializing in interactive media development. He works for Synapse Games and teaches classes in game development at Columbia College Chicago.

"Joe Hocking wastes none of your time and gets you coding fast." - from the foreword by Jesse Schell, Author of "The Art of Design"

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Manning Publications; 1st edition (July 7, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 161729232X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1617292323
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,612,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #361 in C# Programming (Books)
- #569 in Mobile App Development & Programming
- #1,014 in Game Programming

Customer Reviews:
4.4 115 ratings

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Joe Hocking
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I currently work for Qualcomm as a senior staff engineer using Unity. I wrote the first edition of Unity in Action while working for Synapse Games as a developer of web and mobile games. I've also taught classes at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. I live in the Chicago suburbs, and my website is www.newarteest.com.
I've had a long career in game development, but technically only two places I've worked at were game companies, including Synapse Games. Before that I also created digital artworks in collaboration with Mark Skwarek, showing our work in venues like Famous Accountants gallery in NYC, Boston Cyberarts, ISEA in Ireland, and the Sunshine gallery in Beijing.
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4.4 out of 5

115 global ratings

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Keith A. Borgholthaus

Teach Yourself

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

Most people who look at IT or CS majors think that everything is done with a teacher giving long lectures, and students just knowing how it all works. The reality is the teacher picks out a good book that can be used as a reference with other projects, and shows clean code with good explanations. The teacher often uses the book as the lecture, and the students find tutorials online to further any specific need. That sounds counter intuitive to charging students hundreds of dollars for a single class, but it is actually the teacher finding the right book, and knowing how to fix the code when it screws up.

Unity in Action teaches with good clean code, that gives ideas on how to alter it for more interesting results. I went in thinking of this as if it was a class, only at my own time and pace. But I am learning, have good references to what I need to do, and how it works, plus the ability to alter the code to try out new ideas. Right now I am trying to get a sphere to grow bigger if you kill it. Everything up to the growing bigger is given in the book, and I am searching for the simple command to make it grow larger before it dies. The enemies are running around with twisting cubes around them, and will grow bigger and change color when shot. Everything is there, plus the opportunity to find out more and try out ideas.

For a class, whether through university or your own personal time, this book is a great start into Unity engine.

7 people found this helpful

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Maldorath

Unity newbie's best friend

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Well written and easy to follow, especially considering the highly technical subject. I can't recommend this enough for anyone wanting a jump-start with Unity. Unfortunately, the price is higher than what a lot of game-dev dreaming kids will be able to afford.

There really isn't much here that isn't covered by the extensive online Unity documentation and tutorials, but my cheap-ass went that route at first myself and was left frustrated and stumped by all of the holes in what I was learning. This book puts it all together and explains it well in one understandable start-to-finish guide that you just can't really find anywhere else. Following along with the book helps give you the momentum and confidence you need for starting out.

I'd have liked the book to touch on a few more key subjects, but was overall very happy. I still go back to reference it occasionally, months later while working on my own project. I strongly recommend downloading the free online PDF for that reason; being able to search for keywords is very nice. Later portions of the book build on previous chapters, which also makes that search helpful. The code in my book didn't work for downloading my PDF, but the publisher was very friendly and responsive daily with me via email to help resolve the situation.

7 people found this helpful

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Ben C

Great to begin with, but lack of visual examples really sets it back.

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2017

Verified Purchase

I've been using this book to learn a lot of basic Unity concepts. It's great for learning some basic C# scripts and crafting scenes along with examples. Everything is pretty clear and straightforward until chapter 6 (2D GUI). Then suddenly it says to go to the Unify Wiki and copy/paste this HUGE page of code into your script without explaining ANY of it. It also starts to subtly tell you to delete or add chunks of code from scripts without a visual example, which causes unsureness that wasn't a problem in the beginning of the book. After finishing chapter 6, my UI code wasn't functioning correctly with the scene and I couldn't find a clear point in which I went wrong. The precise explanations and clarity with the concepts disappear after Chapter 5 because the book assumes you've mastered every function of code that you've used one time in previous chapters.

I'm starting to learn Unity with more video courses now. This book helped me learn a lot of foundational concepts, but there's a certain point with learning skills like coding where all books fail.

2 people found this helpful

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GG

Pretty Good Book

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a pretty good book; even though it is the first edition, the code still works as far as I can tell in 2018. The author gives explanations of how things work, then gives you the code, then you try it, and then he discusses the code in more detail about what you just did. You do have to read the text carefully though because if you miss a step (which is often embedded in the text) by reading too fast, it can "steal your soul" as one C# coder once said. But that's not the book's fault necessarily. I deducted a star because I've had difficult logging into Manning and trying to access those resources, and the book touts the ability to do that. But even still, I'd say this is a solid book, still accurate in 2018, but I think you'd probably want to get the 2018 version just to save yourself any possible headaches.

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ROB FAZIO

A great intro book to Unity if you want to get going fast.

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Wow, what a great book. I enjoyed every chapter and can say with confidence that I learned lots of new tricks.

few of the highlights:

1. As a software engineer, I appreciated the fact that Joe put lots of effort in making sure the code is very well structured, easy to understand and concise. I found the usage of patterns very helpful, especially the separation of managers into sub managers. Unfortunately, that kind of detail is often left out in many tutorials (even in Unity's official online tutorials)

2. The flow between chapters is perfect. Each proceeding chapter builds on top of the skills learned in the previous ones (although you can easily skip them if you're already familiar the subject). I have read many software engineering books and often times there is no logical flow between chapters. This book was very easy to follow.

To sum it up, I have learned a lot from this book. I've already started porting some of the scripts (Managers) into my own project (Animated Chess game) and planning on refining some of my old scripts with the tricks I learned from this book (i.e re-implementing my audio system).

Thanks for writing such a great book.

8 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Andy D

Excellent book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

This book is very easy to read, being nicely laid out with progress made at a good pace. The author explains things well and I had no trouble keeping up.

You jump straight in, creating a simple FPS, demonstrating mouse look, movement, collisions, ray casting, simple AI and how scripts are attached to objects and how they interact with objects and other scripts.

As explained in the book, you do need to know how to program *before* reading it, although not necessarily in C# (which is pretty easy to pick-up if you've worked in any OO language, especially Java). This is definitely true as I needed to make several code changes to get the project to work properly in Chapter 3, however it wasn't that difficult, but if you are learning programming at the same time then it would be difficult.

One great feature is the free PDF, offered by Manning Publishing, which means I can read the book in large text and in colour and easily flip between Unity, my code editor and the book with a few keystrokes. This is much easier than having the book open on the desk, next to you. One poor feature is that I couldn't find where to submit my errata on their site. I use TextMate 2 to edit the scripts, as MonoDevelop is pretty horrible and refuses to layout code the way I like it (being a programming I obviously suffer from OCD with such things). I also use Dash to search the Unity API documentation, but you can get by with the online reference just as well.

I've only reached chapter 4, but I'm lapping it up...

6 people found this helpful

Mark

A really good introduction to games programming using Unity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book is a really good introduction to games programming using Unity.
Before buying this book I'd spent a couple of months following online demos and hacking around not really understanding what I was doing.
All those pieces of info I had made sense working through the examples in this book which are very good without being too complicated.

Unity in Action goes through the aspects of Unity at just the right pace giving a sense of accomplishment e.g. by the end of chapter 2 you've got a simple first person demo up and running.
Another reviewer thought there were typos in the examples but I didn't notice any; perhaps I have a newer addition of the book.
If the code didn't compile it was down to my typing mistakes!

The Unity IDE isn't the most intuitive so the examples tell you which menu options to select to perform the various steps. There's a good Appendix which covers some of the other Unity options such as the toolbar.

Hocking clearly states that this is a book about games programming and not graphics. So all the graphics in this book are simple but you are introduced to textures and graphics assets. Again, there is an Appendix pointing you to other resources for graphics.
All the code, graphics assets, icons etc are available for download so all the examples can be finished easily.

Overall I'm very pleased I bought this book.

3 people found this helpful

Niels

Get it if you want to get started quick, especially if you're familiar with Object Oriented programming.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

Halfway through and I really like this book. If you already know some OOP language the coding should be a breeze. It explains videogame concepts as you encounter them, so it's very suitable as an introduction to videogame development.
The examples are fun and interesting and will get you up and running quick. Be sure to use your coupon to get the digital version as well since the printed book is in black and white and some of the pictures are not very clear.
Something else I like is that it explains the different roles involved in making a game, programmers, modelers, animators, artists etc. You will get a well rounded idea of what kind of work is involved for different team roles.

One person found this helpful

Matthew Love

Fantastic intro to Unity and programming games

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2015

Verified Purchase

Fantastic into to Unity.

I primarily program in Python and has did some Pygame. I found I wanted to learn to use an engine instead of having to deal with low level issues presented by Pygame. I felt Unity was a decent choice and got this book.

It has a great progression as it starts with getting a simple cube on screen and ends with building your program for various platforms.
It doesn't have that issue where the first half of the book is fine and then the author leaves you behind and you're left scratching your head in confusion.

The author expects you to have some programming experience and I'd agree. The code is never hard to follow but I feel if you'd never programmed before you may find it tough going.

I also felt dedicating 1-2 chapters to Unity's 2D tools was a nice touch.

Definitely worth purchasing if you're looking at getting into games programming.

11 people found this helpful

Joseph Lam

Looking to start Unity game development? This is the book to get

Reviewed in Canada on August 15, 2017

Verified Purchase

I've gone through 3 other books on Unity before settling on this book as my go-to reading materials to begin my training on Unity game development. I am an advanced Android developer with no knowledge at all in Unity development. This book is easy enough to get me started in the core concepts of game development in Unity, yet advanced enough to show me how I can develop more complex games in this tool suite. If I can get one book to get started with Unity, this would be it. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

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