Chapter 1. Experiencing the OUYA

The OUYA is a powerful and unique machine, because it gives hobbyists and independent developers a way to create and deploy professional-grade games without an overwhelming amount of groundwork. To begin making games for the OUYA, you won't need more than a basic understanding of game mechanics and a passion for development. This book will take you from your first prototype to a polished product ready to make its debut in the OUYA marketplace.

The lessons in this book will be demonstrated using the Unity3D engine, a popular development engine that's simple to learn with essential systems such as physics and user interface already built in. Unity and the OUYA both support a variety of scripting languages, but in this book, we'll be focusing on C#, a relatively easy yet versatile language that supports virtually any data structure your game will need.

You may already be familiar with the Unity engine; several popular games, such as Temple Run 2 by Imangi Studios and Scrolls by Mojang (of Minecraft fame), have been built using Unity. You'll soon learn that the OUYA can take full advantage of the 3D capabilities of Unity to make the game of your dreams become real.

This first chapter will be a basic review of the default configuration of the OUYA and a demonstration of its capabilities using a game as an example. If you've already had some time to play around with your OUYA and you feel ready to get started with development, feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter, where we'll install our development environment and start deploying code to the console.