Preface

I still remember that moment of my life when I was afraid of telling my parents that I was going to study Game Development. At that time, in my region, that was considered a childish desire by most parents, and a career with no future, but I was stubborn enough not to care and to follow my dream. Today, Game Development is one of the biggest industries, generating more revenue than Film.

Of course, following my dream was more difficult than I thought. Anyone with the same dream as me sooner or later faces the fact that developing games is a difficult task that requires a deep level of knowledge in different areas. Sadly, most people give up due to this difficulty level, but I strongly believe that with the proper guidance and tools, you can make your career path easier. In my case, what helped me to flatten the learning curve was learning to use Unity.

Welcome to this book about Unity 2021. Here, you will learn how to use the most recent Unity features to create your first videogame in the simplest way possible nowadays. Unity is a tool that provides you with powerful but simple-to-use features to solve the most common problems in Game Development, such as Rendering, Animation, Physics, Sound, and Effects. We will be using all these features to create a simple but complete game, learning all the nuances needed to handle Unity.

If you have read the 2020 edition of this book, you will find that not only have the contents been updated to the latest Unity and Packages versions, but also new content has been introduced in 2021, such as coverage of UI Toolkit and Visual Scripting.

By the end of this book, you will be able to use Unity in a way that will allow you to start studying in depth the areas of Game Development that you are interested in to build your career or simply create hobby games just for the joy of doing it. Unity is a versatile tool that can be used in both Professional and Amateur projects, and is being used every day by more and more people. It is worth mentioning that Unity can be used not only for creating games but for any kind of interactive apps, from simple mobile apps to complex training or educative applications (known as Serious Gaming), using the latest technologies such as Augmented or Virtual Reality. So, even if we are creating a game here, you are starting a learning path that can end in lots of possible specializations.