Preface

As the Ouya technology is so new, finding information about developing for it can be hard. This book covers all that you'll need to know to create your game and add great features to it, such as controller functionality, animation, sounds, and monetization. We'll even show you how to make it work on Android phones and tablets.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is Ouya and Why Does It Matter?, gives a brief history of video games. We'll show where they've come from, where they're going, and how the Ouya technology fits in to that journey.

Chapter 2, Setting Up Unity and the Ouya Plugin, will guide you through installing the development kits needed and show how to set up your Unity project so that you can build to the Ouya platform.

Chapter 3, Setting Up Your Game, explains the differences between three of the languages you can use to program in Unity and builds the foundation for our game.

Chapter 4, Adding a Character and Making Them Move, explains about adding movement to the camera and making it follow a player around the level. It also explains expanding upon your character and adding animations.

Chapter 5, Adding Finesse to Your Game, explains how to texture your prefabs,add sounds and more levels. This chapter will really flesh out the game.

Chapter 6, Show Me the Money!, will add In-App Purchases, which will allow you to monetize your awesome new creations.

Chapter 7, Building Cross-platform Games, explains that one of Unity's strongest features is its write-once, publish-everywhere functionality. Leverage this ability and get your game running on Android phones and tablets.

What you need for this book

For this book you will be required to download the free version of Unity available at the following link:

• http://www.unity3d.com/unity/download

Your computer should also meet the minimum requirements, as stated on the Unity website. For the latest requirements, refer to the following link:

• http://unity3d.com/unity/system-requirements

You will also need the Android SDK, NDK, Java, and Ouya Development Kit. The download, installation, and setup of these is covered in Chapter 2, Setting Up Unity and the Ouya Plugin.

Who this book is for

This book is for beginner programmers upwards; a basic understanding of Unity is required. All concepts are explained, even if they are simple.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We won't be using the System.Collections in this script, so we can go ahead and delete that line although it won't affect if you leave it in".

A block of code is set as follows:

usingUnityEngine;

public class AdvanceToNextLevel : MonoBehaviour {

  // Use this for initialization
  void Awake () {
    Application.LoadLevel("TitleScreen");
  }
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We're going to create some new folders to hold other files in project, so click on the Create drop-down menu, which is located just underneath the Project tab in panel you opened".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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