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Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development
Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development

Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development: Enter the world of 2D Game development with Unity 5.x

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Getting Started with Unity 5.x 2D Game Development

Chapter 1. A Flat World in Unity

This is the beginning of our journey in to the world of 2D game development with Unity. This book is structured to guide you through the creation of an entire 2D game from scratch, in particular a tower defense game.

Despite the fact that we will focus on 2D game development, our final goal is to learn how to use Unity, and therefore this means that we will also have a glance at how Unity handles 3D. So, if later on you want to dedicate some time to 3D games, by the end of this book you will have the necessary background for doing so. In fact, the book is structured to contain as much detail as possible for each topic, and this includes historical overviews and references to further readings.

In every chapter, we will face different challenges that will improve our skills. Furthermore, this book doesn't stop by telling you just what needs to be done (like many others), but it also explains the different tools that we will encounter and how to use them. In this way, we will learn how to use and apply them in different contexts as well. Thus, you can use this book as a reference manual, in order to speed up your workflow. To help you out, I recommend that you use the index, to quickly locate each one of the specific topics we will face.

At the end of each chapter, there is a Homework section, which leaves you with some exercises that are related to the topics that we have dealt in that chapter. Of course, you are free to skip this section, but I recommend that you do the exercises if you feel that you need to improve your skills even more.

For now, this chapter is an introduction to the 2D world inside Unity, and what needs to be done in order to create our game. In particular, we will look at the following topics:

  • What are 2D games?
  • What does designing and developing 2D games mean?
  • Where to get Unity and its different versions
  • Downloading a graphical package from an external source
  • How to organize a project in Unity
  • Understanding Unity when it is set in 2D
  • What are Sprites?
  • The Sprite Renderer component
  • Import settings for Sprites
  • How to use the Sprite Editor with all its different modes
  • Preparing the assets for our game
  • Setting up scenes and proportions

One last thing. Sometimes I'll refer to the player and to characters in order to make examples or explain concepts. As such, sometimes I'll refer to them as if they were males, and at other times as if they were females (and sometimes both). The reason derives from my personal point of view so as to not to discriminate between the two genders.

And with this said, let's get started!

Learning game development

Game development and design are some of the most extensive works of art around. This is due to the large amount of expertise that is required to bring a game to life. You can get an idea of this by just looking at any credits in a game. They are extensive and contain a lot of names of people who have dedicated a lot of their time to the game in various roles.

Like most things in life, game development can be learned not only through practice, but iteration as well. And even when you master one of the many branches in game development, there is still something new to learn.

Regardless of your level of knowledge of Unity, I strongly suggest that you follow each step in this book, even if you think you know the topic. You just never know, there is always something new to learn!

Tower defense games

Tower defense games come in many different styles. For example, in the following screenshot of Defense Grid: The Awakening and Unstoppable Gorg, both are top-down isometric style games. However, they are set in different worlds, with different objectives. So, given this, what makes a tower defense game? For one, they are centered on the idea of defending something, whether it is buildings, resources, weapons, and so forth. This is the main mechanism that defines the genre and drives the gameplay. Secondly, most tower defense games require economic and resource management. For example, after each wave of enemies, you may obtain a certain amount of virtual currency that you must then allocate to either the purchase of new defenses (weapons, towers, and so on) or upgrades. Each has their benefits depending on a range of factors such as weak points in your defense as well as the anticipated amount and strength of enemies that will be in the next wave. The number and difficulty of enemies increases after each wave, therefore challenging the player to manage resources and build defenses strategically. The idea is to build up enough resources to upgrade your defenses and to outlast the incoming wave. Sometimes, the player must stop the enemies (or an opponent) from destroying their own base.

In other cases, the player must prevent the enemies from reaching the end, as each enemy that manages to get through cause damage to the player's health bar.

Tower defense games

(Top) Defense Grid: The Awakening and (bottom) Unstoppable Gorg

There are many places on the Internet where you can find tower defense games. For example, Kongregate (http://www.kongregate.com/) and Newgrounds (http://www.newgrounds.com/) are examples of sites where a varied array of free tower defense games exist (such as Kingdom Rush or Bloons Tower Defense 5). However, many exist for iOS (App Store) and Android (Play Store), operating systems such as Linux, OSX, and PC (for example, Steam), and consoles (Playstation, Xbox), and so on.

Designing our game

Before you even think about turning your computer on, you need to design your game. It's not enough to have a rough idea in mind. You need to write down all your ideas before hand to start working. The first phase of game design is brainstorming. There are different techniques and methodologies of brainstorming that, unfortunately, we don't have the time, in this small section, to describe. However, the final outcome should be tons of paper with thousands of ideas written down. It's not meant to be a work of art, but the foundations upon which your game will be built.

Note

Some information about brainstorming can be found also in a practical book, Gamification with Unity, by Packt publishing. You can find it here: https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/gamification-unity-5x.

The next step is to refine your ideas, discard (or keep for other projects) the ones that you don't need, and organize them in a coherent form.

The final result should be something like the following.

Panda Invasion is a 2D tower defense game. In fact, hungry pandas are invading to steal all the sugar from the player. He or she has to push back the pandas by using cupcake towers. There are different kinds of cupcake towers that the player can decide to place in the map. In every level, there will be a path that pandas will follow. Furthermore, they are spawned at the beginning of this path. At the end, there is the ambitious sugar castle that the player has to defend. If the pandas steal too much, bringing the sugar-meter to zero, the player has failed his or her important mission. On the contrary, if he or she is able to push all of them back, the player will gain victory. However, cupcake towers are not free. In fact, the player has to buy them by using candy. Every time that a panda is pushed back, then the player will earn a certain amount of candy. Furthermore, the player can use candy to upgrade the cupcake towers and make them even stronger!

From this excerpt, you are now able to understand what we are going to do in this book. You also have a basic idea of how to write down your ideas. I strongly suggest that you always do this step, even when you are the only developer, and especially when you have a team.

Getting ready

Now that we have our idea, the next thing to do is to get Unity. It comes in different versions: Personal (which is free), Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The last three contain more features than the Personal one. However, all the topics covered in this book can be done with the free version. In any case, you can get or buy Unity on the official website: www.unity3d.com.

This is the comparison screen between the different versions of Unity on the Unity Technologies website (if you scroll down, you will find which feature is included in which version):

Getting ready

Note

This is a very short summary of how model pricing for Unity has varied in recent years. In fact, to become a developer also means to be aware of the world around you, and having basic marketing knowledge could also help. At the beginning, the model price of Unity didn't allow developers to publish commercial games with the free version. In addition, the game engine didn't have all the features, such as the Profiler or the Movie Textures. Epic Games, the company that owns Unreal Engine, changed its model prices by making its game engine free in March 2015, also for commercial use (although it will take in return the 5% of the game's gross revenue). After a period of time, Unity Technologies also allowed developers to publish commercial games even with the free version, but it was still watermarked. From Unity 5.x, features that were only in the Pro version became available in the free version as well. During the beginning of 2016, Unity used to come in two different versions: Free (or Personal) and Professional. The latter contains more features than the Personal one, and here is the comparison screen of the two:

Getting ready

In June 2016, Unity changed its price model in the one described earlier.

Once we have installed Unity, we can begin creating new projects. If we click on the New project button in the top-right corner of the window, Unity will ask us to insert the details for our project. We can name it Panda Invasion and choose the destination path, which is where the files of the project will be stored. There is another an important thing to note. Unity gives us the possibility to choose between a 3D and a 2D project. This is not important decision, since it can be changed at any time. However, it is useful to already have in mind whether or not the game will be 2D or 3D. By selecting the 2D mode, Unity adapts the default settings to the game that we have in mind. We will see these settings in the following sections. For now, you should have a screen that looks like the following:

Getting ready

Now, we can press the Create project button, and we have successfully created our project and are ready to build it.

This book assumes that you are fairly familiar with the Unity interface and with C# code. If you are not, don't worry. There are different ways that you can learn before continuing on with this book. For example, I wrote a small free e-guide that briefly goes through the main interfaces and concepts of Unity. Don't expect to learn all you need from there, but it is a good start. You can find it at https://www.packtpub.com/packt/free-ebook/what-you-need-know-about-unity-5. If you are a complete newcomer to Unity, please read that small e-guide. I'll still be here once you have finished and we can resume our awesome journey. Furthermore, the official manual of Unity and its documentation are great companions in the Unity game development world. You can find them both on the official website, at https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/index.html.

Since we don't have the time to create our own graphics for the game that we are going to develop, we need to download a custom package. Of course, you are free to choose the one you like most. For this book, we are going to use the Tower Defence Pack 2 package, which can be downloaded from http://player26.com/.

Note

Tower Defence Pack 2 features a delicious assortment of cupcakes ranging from infamous fluffy white frosting and colorful sprinkles, to decadent chocolate chip, not to mention an all-time favorite, lemon meringue with silver dragees. It also features the Sugar Castle, a home away from home for candy lovers! In addition to all this sugary goodness are trees, mountains, rainbows, and various other assets to populate your sugary environment. Just be beware, there are some hidden dangers among it all with the pandas, so be careful to keep your stash well protected from thieving sweet-toothed animals!

The package includes all the basic assets that we need to create our tower defense game. It is free, even for commercial use, and even if credits are required. There is also a premium version that contains more assets and some of the decorations in different Sprites to increase customizability. In particular, in the free version we can find:

  • Maps designed for tower defense games
  • Evil pandas (with animation)
  • Three different upgrading levels for cupcakes towers
  • Multiple icons for each object in the package
  • And many more assets to populate the level with!

The following image can give you an idea of the kind of graphics this package contains:

Getting ready

So, download this package before moving on to the next section.

Remembering the past to build the future

If you are new to Unity, or you have only used Unity 5.x, you can skip this section or read it just for curiosity.

In Unity 4.x (before version 4.6) and other previous versions, building 2D games was a bit harder. In fact, you needed to use a range of different methods and tricks to achieve the illusion on 2D. All the 2D objects were actually 3D objects viewed in a particular perspective or with a particular camera, which gave the illusion of a 2D object.

From Unity 4.6 on, and especially since Unity 5.x, this is not needed any more. There is built-in support for 2D games. So now, there are special components to deal with 2D objects, and the following sections will explore some of them.

Organizing the project

There are different ways to organize a project within Unity, therefore giving a bit more freedom. In this section, we propose one method, which we will use during the development of the project in this book.

The key idea is to organize the different assets by type (and not, as in other methods, by their position within the level).

First of all, let's understand how Unity organizes assets. All of them are placed inside a folder named Assets, which can be found also inside the Project folder. Therefore, all our assets should be contained in this folder or subfolder. In order to create a new folder, right-click on the Project panel and then Create | Folder. As a result, a new folder is created within the folder you clicked. Since we don't have any folders, it will be a subfolder of the Assets one. We have the option to rename it as we want. If you miss this, you can just select it and then click on it again (but not too fast, otherwise Unity will consider this as a double-click and it will open the folder), as shown in the following screenshot:

Organizing the project

Note

It is important to note that Unity will ignore the following categories, in order to avoid importing system files:

  • Hidden folders and files
  • Folder and files that starts with ~ and with .
  • Folders and files named cvs
  • Files which have a .tmp extension

We need to create the following folders (you should only create the ones in bold, since we will not use the other ones):

  • Fonts
  • Graphics
  • Materials
  • Animations (we will see them in more detail in Chapter 4No Longer Alone - Sweet-Toothed Pandas Strike)
  • Music and sounds
  • Other assets (to store, for instance, .txt assets)
  • Physical materials
  • Prefabs (we will see what they are in the next chapter)
  • Scenes
  • Scripts

Note

If you are planning to create a 3D game, the folders will be different and they will include other kind of assets, such as 3D models and textures.

At the end, we should see the following in our Project panel (I'll add the Animation folder in Chapter 4, No Longer Alone - Sweet-Toothed Pandas Strike, when we will see animations, but feel free to add it immediately if you like):

Organizing the project

There is something else to know about the folders in your projects. If you create folders with some specific names, Unity will treat them in a special way. We are not going to use them; however, it's worth giving them a quick look:

  • Editor (or a subfolder within it): This contains editor scripts rather than runtime scripts. These are designed to implement new functionality in Unity during the development of your games, and will not be included in the published game. As a result, you cannot use any of the scripts inside this folder within your Scene. Furthermore, it's possible to use more than one Editor folder in your project (even if this affects the execution order).
  • Editor Default Resources: This contains resources that can be loaded on-demand by editor scripts by using the EditorGUIUtility.Load() function.
  • Resources (or a subfolder within it): This contains all the assets that can be loaded on demand from a script by using the Resources.Load() function. In fact, you may need to load an asset that is not present in the scene yet. As with the Editor folder, you can have as many as you want in your project.
  • Plugins: This contains native DLLs, written in C/C++, which can access third-party libraries, system calls, and other functions that Unity doesn't provide directly. As the name suggests, it is used to implement or import plugins.
  • StreamingAssets: This contains assets that will not be included in your main game file, but that can be streamed from a script.
  • WebPlayerTemplates: This contains custom host pages to use when the target platform is the WebPlayer. Scripts in this folder will not be compiled.

Coming back to our folder, we need to import the package that we have downloaded. This can be done in a number of different ways, but the easiest way is to drag and drop the folder of the package within our Graphics folder.

If you need to select an asset to use, in the bottom-left corner of the Project panel, there is a slider that allows you to increase the size of the icons in the Project panel. This function is useful when there are a lot of assets and we need to find the right one without knowing the name, or when exploring new packages we don't know yet. The slider is highlighted in the following screenshot for your convenience:

Organizing the project

A 2D world

There are few things to notice in our project when it is set to 2D mode, which we are going to explore in this section.

First of all, if you ever need to switch between 2D and 3D mode, you can do so by navigating to Edit | Project Settings | Editor. If you go in to the Default Behavior Mode settings, you can change the Mode, as shown in the following screenshot:

A 2D world

Coming back to our main interface, let's see the main differences between 2D and 3D mode. The Scene view is set by default to 2D, as you can see in the following screenshot:

A 2D world

This allows us to have the Scene view locked on to the xy plane.

Note

The z axis is used to determine which object should be rendered first. This decides which objects are in the foreground and which ones are in the background.

Then, every time we create a new scene, the default camera that comes with it is always set in Orthographic mode. Furthermore, its position is set to (0, 0, -10), whereas in 3D mode, it is set to (0, 1, -10). You can also check this by selecting the Main Camera in the Hierarchy panel and seeing its properties in the Inspector, as shown in the following screenshot:

A 2D world

Other differences are the options to use the Sprite Packer or the default objects that don't have real-time directional lights. There are also changes in the Lighting settings (you can access them from Window/Lighting). In particular, the Skybox is disabled for new scenes and Precomputed Realtime GI, Baked GI, and Auto-Building are set to off. In addition, the Ambient Source comes with a dark grey color.

In the following screenshot, you can see the default Lighting settings:

A 2D world

Note

The RGB code of the color of the Ambient Source that is set by default in the 2D mode is (54, 58, 66).

However, the most important difference is how Unity imports new 2D assets, but we are going to see this in detail in the following sections.

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Key benefits

  • Build a complete and exciting 2D Tower Defense game from scratch.
  • Understand and learn to perform each phase of the game development pipeline
  • Homework and exercises to improve your skills and take them to the next level

Description

Want to get started in the world of 2D game development with Unity? This book will take your hand and guide you through this amazing journey to let you know exactly what you need to build the games you want to build, without sacrificing quality. You will build a solid understanding of Unity 5.x, by focusing with the embedded tools to develop 2D games. In learning about these, along with accurate explanations and practical examples, you will design, develop, learn how to market and publish a delectable Tower Defense game about cupcakes versus pandas. Each chapter in this book is structured to give you a full understanding on a specific aspect of the workflow pipeline. Each of these aspects are essential for developing games in Unity. In a step-by-step approach, you will learn about each of the following phases: Game Design, Asset Importing, Scripting, User Interfaces, Animations, Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Gameplay Programming, Polishing and Improving, Marketing, Publishing and much more. This book provides you with exercises and homework at the end of each chapter so that you can level up your skills as a Unity game developer. In addition, each of these parts are centered on a common point of discussion with other learners just like you. Therefore, by sharing your ideas with other people you will not only develop your skills but you will also build a network.

Who is this book for?

If you are looking forward to get started with 2D game development, either if you are a newcomer to this world, or you came from 3D games or other game engines, this book is for you. Although there are many references to other resources throughout the book, it is assumed that you have a general understanding of C# and its syntax and structure.

What you will learn

  • Import and set up assets for 2D game development
  • Design and implement dynamic and responsive User Interfaces
  • Create and handle complex animation systems
  • Unlock all the potentiality of the physics engine
  • Implement Artificial Intelligence algorithms to give intelligence to your NPCs
  • Script gameplay and overall bring your ideas to life

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. A Flat World in Unity Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Baking Cupcake Towers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Communicating with the Player – the User Interface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. No Longer Alone – Sweet-Toothed Pandas Strike Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. The Secret Ingredient Is a Dash of Physics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Through a Sea of Sprinkles – Navigation in Artificial Intelligence Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Trading Cupcakes and the Ultimate Battle for the Cake – Gameplay Programming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. What Is beyond the Cake? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 33.3%
1 star 0%
Bart Knowles Feb 27, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
In the vast sea of technical manuals, each of us is looking for something specific. I found exactly what I wanted in this book: a clear, step-by-step guide to writing a real game with Unity. I was not looking for abstract theory or academic blah blah, therefore if you are looking for those, you shouldn't probably buy this one.But if you are, as I am, into serious game programming and want to learn without useless fatigue how to develop your own game, together with priceless insider tips along the way, then you've come to the right place. I haven't read it all yet (a bit more than halfway through), but I am programming as I proceed, and the tower defense game that is coming out is pretty cool. It won't be my final product, of course, but I am planning on experimenting with variations until I get to my perfect tower defense game!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Stelvio Feb 25, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I'm getting started! And this book's helping me so much. A few days ago I even proposed it to my teacher, I'm quite sure he's going to adopt it for his course.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
TechReader Feb 21, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
I've read enough technical books over the years to know that reading a really great one is effortless, and reading a not so great one can be the most frustrating thing. This one's not so great. The main problem this book suffers from is that the author tells you what he wants you to do, but not EXACTLY what he wants you to do. Quick example, in an early chapter the author explains all about the Sprite Editor by stepping through an example with an actual sprite. Then he tells you to do the rest of the sprites in the example game the same way before moving on. When you try do it the same way, you wind up with sprites getting cut right through the middle of the graphics and you're left wondering if this is intentional or not? Then it takes way too much time and effort to decide on what to do next, and once you do decide, you don't know if you've done it right or not. This happens over and over again throughout the book, and it takes quite an effort to figure out what's going on. If you like a challenge and a struggle while learning, then this book might be for you. If you learn better from clear instructions and want to breeze through each topic like I do, then look for another Unity book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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