Preface

As one of the most widely used game engines in the world, Unity provides easy-to-use and powerful game development tools, which undoubtedly attracts many developers to choose it to develop their own games. However, the tools needed in modern game development are not limited to game engines; other tools and services such as the cloud are increasingly used in game development. In this book, we will explore how to use the Unity game engine and the Microsoft Game Dev, including the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Microsoft Azure PlayFab services, to create games.

Starting by understanding the fundamentals of the Unity game engine, you will gradually become familiar with the Unity Editor and the key concepts of writing Unity scripts in C#, which will get you ready to make your own game.

Then, you'll learn how to work with Unity's built-in modules, such as the UI system, animation system, physics system, and how to integrate video and audio in your game to make your game more interesting.

As you progress through the chapters, I'll take you through advanced topics, such as the math involved in computer graphics, how to create post-processing effects in Unity with the new Scriptable Render Pipeline, how to use Unity's C# Job System to implement multithreading, and how to use Unity's Entity Component System (ECS) to write game logic code in a data-oriented way to improve game performance.

Along the way, you'll also learn about the Microsoft Game Dev, the Azure cloud services, Azure PlayFab, and using the Unity3D PlayFab SDK to access the PlayFab API to save and load data from the cloud.

By the end of this book, you'll be familiar with the Unity game engine, have a high-level understanding of the Azure cloud, and be ready to develop your own games.