Unity in Action, Third Edition

Joseph Hocking's guide is for people who want to make games quickly in Unity, a platform whose engine takes care of much of the technical groundwork so developers can focus on gameplay, visuals, and player experience. It skips long detours through fundamentals and instead builds on the coding skills you already have, carrying you from writing scripts to making working games in 2D, 3D, and augmented or virtual reality.

Along the way you will make characters that run, jump, and collide with objects, along with 3D first-person shooters, third-person action games, 2D card games, and side-scrolling platformers. You will also script enemies that use AI, improve a game's look by importing models and images, design user interfaces, add music and sound effects that respond to position in the scene, connect your games to the internet for online play, and publish finished projects to desktop, mobile, and the web.

The process starts with the groundwork of a new project, and the emphasis is on writing your own code rather than assembling premade scripts. By the end, the aim is to help you master the Unity toolset from the ground up and move from application programmer to game developer. This third edition updates the graphics, covers the newest Unity features, and adds coverage of the augmented and virtual reality toolkits. Thousands of new game developers have used the book as their first introduction to Unity.

The book is written for programmers who already know an object-oriented language. Its examples use C#, but no prior experience with C# is needed. The foreword is by Jesse Schell.