You've got Unity up and running, studied the interface, added some GameObjects to the Scene. Now you're ready to have those GameObjects move around, listen, speak, pick up other objects, shoot the bad guys, or anything else you can dream of. So you click on Play, and nothing happens. Well darn it all anyway.

You just learned a big lesson, all those fantastic, highly detailed GameObjects are dumber than a hammer. They don't know anything, and they sure don't know how to do anything.

So you proceed to read the Unity forums, study some scripting tutorials, maybe even copy and paste some scripts to get some action going when you press Play. That's great, but then you realize you don't understand anything in the scripts you've copied. Sure, you probably recognize the words, but you fail to understand what those words do or mean in a script. It feels like gibberish.

You look at the code, your palms get sweaty, and you think to yourself, "Geez, I'll never be able to write scripts!" Perhaps you have scriptphobia: the fear of not being able to write instructions (I made that up). Is that what you have?

The fear that you cannot write down instructions in a coherent manner? You may believe you have this affliction, but you don't. You only think you do.

The basics of writing code are quite simple. In fact, you do things every day that are just like the steps executed in a script. For example, do you know how to interact with other people? How to operate a computer? Do you fret so much about making a baloney sandwich that you have to go to an online forum and ask how to do it?

Of course you don't. In fact, you know these things as "every day routines", or maybe as habits. Think for a moment, do you have to consciously think about these routines you do every day? Probably not. After you do them over and over, they become automatic.

The point is, you do things everyday following sequences of steps. Who created these steps you follow? More than likely you did, which means you've been scripting your whole life. You just never had to write down the steps, for your daily routines, on a piece of paper before doing them. You could write the steps down if you really wanted to, but it takes too much time and there's no need. But you do, in fact, know how to. Well, guess what? To write scripts, you only have to make one small change, start writing down the steps. Not for yourself but for the world you're creating in Unity.

So you see, you are already familiar with the concept of dealing with scripts. Most beginners to Unity easily learn their way around the Unity interface, how to add assets, and work in the Scene and Hierarchy windows. Their primary fear, and roadblock, is their false belief that scripting is too hard to learn.

Relax! You now have this book. I am going to get really basic in the beginning chapters.Call them baby-steps if you want, but you will see that scripting for Unity is similar to doing things you already do everyday. I'm sure you will have many "Ah-Ha" moments as you learn and overcome your unjustified fears and beliefs.

So why choose C# to create this code? This maybe after-the-fact information for you if you've already acquired this book and chosen to use C#, but these are valuable points to know anyway:

When we begin writing scripts, we will be looking at Unity's documentation quite often, so it's beneficial to know how to access the information we need. For an overview of a topic we'll use the Reference Manual. For specific coding details and examples we'll use the Scripting Reference.

To get a feel for accessing Unity's documentation from within Unity, we'll use the Main Camera to demonstrate. Every GameObject in a Scene has a Transform Component, so we'll look at the documentation for Transform in the Reference Manual and the Scripting Reference. Getting to the information is pretty easy. Click on the tiny book icon with the question mark.

From the Reference Manual, we'll now open the Scripting Reference documentation for the Transform Component.

What just happened?

The Transform page in the Scripting Reference opens in the web browser as shown in the following screenshot:

Until you learn some basic programming concepts, it's too early to study how scripts work, but we still need to know how to create one.

There are several ways to create a script file using Unity:

As our Unity project progresses, we will have several folders to organize and store all of our C# files.

Unity will synchronize with MonoDevelop the first time you tell Unity to open a file for editing. The simplest way to do this is just double-click on LearningScript in the Scripts folder.

public class LearningScript : MonoBehaviour

public class NewBehaviourScript : MonoBehaviour

This chapter tried to put you at ease about writing scripts for Unity. You do have the ability to write down instructions which is all a script is, a sequence of instructions. We saw how simple it is to create a new script file. You probably create files on your computer all the time. We saw how to easily bring up Unity's documentation. Finally we had a look at the MonoDevelop editor. None of this was complicated. In fact, you probably use apps all the time that do similar things. Bottom line, there's nothing to fear here.

Alright, let's start off Chapter 2 Introducing the Building Blocks for Unity Scripts by having an introductory look at the building blocks of programming we'll be using: variables, methods, Dot Syntax, and the class. Don't let these terms scare you. The concepts behind each one of these are similar to things you do often, perhaps every day.