OUYA Game Development by Example: An all-inclusive, fun guide to making professional 3D games for the OUYA console

The first thing we'll do is install the game engine itself. It's a good idea to install Unity first because you'll have to link every other package as and when you download it.

You'll be spending most of your time throughout the course of this book working in the Unity environment, so it's important to get it set up correctly and acclimate yourself with every element of the workspace layout. Perform the following steps to set up Unity:

Right now, your Unity installation can only build and run games that are playable on your standalone PC/Mac client. Feel free to exit Unity for now—we'll come back to it when we've downloaded all of the required packages.

The first component we'll need is the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Engine (JRE) to handle the Java-side of the OUYA console. Because these are common packages, you may already have them installed on your computer; to check this, open a command line (Command Prompt in Windows or Terminal in Mac) and type the command javac -version. If a version number is displayed, skip over step one of this section and move on to downloading the Android ADT bundle. If you receive an error message that reads "command not found", continue with these steps to install the JDK and JRE.

Before you issue commands to OUYA from your command line or terminal, you'll need to make sure your system recognizes those commands. To do this, you'll be editing your PATH variable to include the location of the Android SDK you downloaded.

Mac OS and Windows both have PATH variables, but they're edited differently; the upcoming tutorials will cover both the operations step by step.

If you're using Mac OS, your PATH variable can read paths from your .bash_profile script. If you aren't familiar with it, you may not have one yet; so in that case, you'll need to create it by performing the following steps:

Once you have your bash profile open, add the following lines to it:

export ANDROID_HOME="~/Development/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64"
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/sdk/tools
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/sdk/platform-tools

Now that you've edited your PATH variable, you'll want to refresh it by...

Perform the following steps to edit the PATH variable on Windows:

The SDK manager will give you a list of packages that you can check and install by performing the following steps:

The packages include almost everything we need, but we need to manually configure the Android USB driver before it's ready to use, which is what we'll do next.

Now is a good time to connect your OUYA to the computer and establish a connection between the two. Use a micro USB-to-USB cable to connect them together and press the power button on the top of the OUYA to turn it on.

You can verify that the device is connected by running the following three commands in succession:

android update adb
adb kill-server
adb devices

If the OUYA is powered on and connected, you should see it represented as a string of seemingly random characters in the device list. However, because the OUYA is a unique device, the driver information that you downloaded with the SDK manager may not have everything it needs to properly detect the OUYA when it's connected to your computer. To fix this, we'll have to manually insert an entry for OUYA into the driver file. Note that this step is only necessary if you're running a Windows operating system; if you're developing for OUYA on a Mac, this won't be an issue and your OUYA will connect without...

The file we need to edit on Windows operating systems is found at C:\Development\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64\sdk\extras\google\usb_driver\android_winusb.inf. Perform the following steps to edit the driver file:

The last thing you need before you can link everything you've downloaded to Unity is the Unity OUYA plugin. This can be downloaded directly from the developers at https://github.com/ouya/ouya-unity-plugin. Perform the following steps to install the plugin:

Now that you have all of the packages required for OUYA development, you can import them into the Unity workspace by performing the following steps:

At long last, the linking is complete! Give yourself a pat on the back for getting through the dull part. Even though you haven't done any development yet, all of the packages that you downloaded, configured, and linked to Unity will allow you to deploy your code to run on your OUYA console natively at any time, which is an important step in creating software for an external device. Save the project as it is so that you have a linked project ready to go for the next chapter where you'll begin programming and testing.