What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating a Unity Project, teaches you how to install and set up Unity on your computer, and also how to create your first project.

Chapter 2, Editing Scenes and GameObjects, teaches you the concepts of Scenes and GameObjects, the Unity way to describe what your game world is composed of.

Chapter 3, Working with Scenes and Game Objects, is where we will be creating our first level layout, prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.

Chapter 4, Importing and Integrating Assets, is where we will be creating our first level layout, prototyping it with the Terrain and ProBuilder Unity features.

Chapter 5, Introduction to C# and Visual Scripting, is the first programming chapter of the book. We will learn how to create our first script using C# in the Unity way, and then we will explore how to do the same with Visual Scripting, the new node-based coding language of Unity. The rest of the programming chapters will show how to code the game in both languages.

Chapter 6, Implementing Movement and Spawning, teaches you how to program the movement of your objects and how to spawn them. This chapter introduces the new Unity Input System. General programming knowledge is assumed from now on.

Chapter 7, Physics Collisions and Health System, teaches you how to configure the Physics settings of objects to detect when two of them collide and react to the collision, creating a health system, in this case.

Chapter 8, Win and Lose Condition, covers how to detect when the game should end, both when the player wins and loses.

Chapter 9, Implementing Game AI for Building Enemies, covers creating a basic AI using several Unity features for creating challenging enemies in our game.

Chapter 10, Materials and Effects with URP and Shader Graph, shows how to use one of the latest Unity render systems (Universal Render Pipeline, or URP) and how to create effects with the Shader Graph feature.

Chapter 11, Visual Effects with Particle Systems and Visual Effect Graph, teaches you how to create visual effects such as water and fire using the two main Unity tools for doing so, Particle Systems and VFX Graph, and how to make scripts that control them according to what’s happening in the game.

Chapter 12, Lighting Using the Univeral Render Pipeline, looks at lighting, which is a concept big enough to have its own chapter. Here, we will deepen our knowledge of the Universal Render Pipeline, specifically its lighting capabilities.

Chapter 13, Fullscreen Effects with Postprocessing, teaches you how to add a layer of effects on top of your scene graphics using the postprocessing feature of the Universal Render Pipeline to get that film effect most modern games have today.

Chapter 14, Sound and Music Integration, covers a topic that is underestimated by most beginner developers; here we will learn how to properly add sound and music to our game, taking into consideration its impact on performance. This also covers how to script the sound.

Chapter 15, User Interface Design, looks at the User Interface (UI). Of all the graphical ways to communicate information to the user, the UI is the most direct one. We will learn how to display information in the form of text, images, and life bars using the Unity UI system, and also how to script the UI.

Chapter 16, Creating a UI with the UI Toolkit, looks at UI Toolkit, which is the successor of Canvas, the UI system we learned about in Chapter 15, User Interface Design. We will explore it to get ahead and be prepared for Unity’s use of this HTML-based toolkit in the future.

Chapter 17, Creating Animations with Animator, Cinemachine, and Timeline, takes us further than the static scene we have created so far. In this chapter, we will start moving our characters and creating cutscenes with the latest Unity features to do so, and how to script them.

Chapter 18, Scene Performance Optimization, discusses how making our game perform well is no easy task, but is certainly needed to release it. Here, we will be learning how to profile our game’s performance and tackle the most common performance issues.

Chapter 19, Building the Project, teaches you how to convert your Unity project into an executable format to distribute it to other people and run it without Unity installed.

Chapter 20, Augmented Reality in Unity, teaches you how to create an AR application with Unity’s AR Foundation package, one of the most recent ways to create AR applications with Unity.