I am currently reading “Unity iOS Essentials”, which I won from ManiacDev’s book giveaway contest.

And so far, I find that this book seems to be all over the place and it inspires to be a Game Design book.

Why made me think so? Well, Chapter 1 is about Planning Ahead for an Unity iOS Game, it starts out pretty clear, it aims to give the readers a little heads up before they start their game, it mentions considerations such as terrain, lighting, audio, etc. And then it got to the Let’s Get Started part, which is pretty much the author make all sorts of game design suggestions, and sometimes he would suggest something and not really explain why, such as he said that Fog is not such a great idea, and he suggests that we use particles instead, but why? Why isn’t fog a good idea? He even mentioned that it adds ambiance, so why isn’t it a good idea? Also there is a whole chunk that he talks about teleportation (wut? o.O), which provides means for players to travel across our large levels. He could have ended that bit there, but he goes on to suggest different ways of doing teleportation, warp gates, trains, what nots. And then after being distracted by all those really not important stuff, he starts talking about culling. Now, culling is important (even the author says so). But the reader could have skipped that part (okay, at least I almost skipped that part because I was skipping the trying to skip the teleportation part).

Chapter 2 is called iOS Performance Guide, but like Chapter 1, instead of getting right down to it (the performance guide), he starts the chapter with different kinds of games that the reader can make. And briefly mention skybox and how we’re supposed to use a cube with reversed normals instead of the one that Unity came with (again, no explanation whatsoever on why we shouldn’t use the Unity one). And then some bits about how we should do our terrain (not the technical part, the design part of making a terrain). Some more bits about different game genres.And then suddenly, Unified Graphic Architecture and the other stuff that actually seems like the iOS Performance Guide.

Chapter 3 is called Advanced Game Concepts, but really the things covered in the chapter is not very advanced, it’s stuff about menus, interface, screen sizes, accelerometer, shaders and organizing your assets.

Chapter 4 is called Flyby Background. Can’t say anything about it, because I skipped it.

I’m after Chapter 5 because it’s about Scalable GUIs, which I happen to be working on right now. So far, it’s understandable, pretty easy to follow. But the way the code bits are edited makes it somewhat unreadable. Oh and don’t expect the code to work as is.

That’s where I am right now, there are still four more chapters that I haven’t read yet.

So far, my comment is, it’s all over the place.

Link: http://www.packtpub.com/unity-3d-essentials-for-ios-games/book

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on #AltDevBlogADay reviewing a Unity3D book written by Ryan Henson Creighton, Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner’s Guide (buy the book, it’s pretty good, so far), but I only gotten around to Chapter 4.

So for this blog post, I will go through some of the other chapters, particularly Chapter 5 and 6, which is about making a game called “Robot Repair”.

Chapter 5 will talk about GUI (graphical user interface, pronounced as “gooey”, like marshmallows). And we’ll be making an entire working 2D flip n’ match memory game in the GUI system.

So let’s get started!

First we open Unity and create a new project called “Robot Repair”, we don’t need to import Standard Assets, according to the boss (Mr. Author, Ryan Henson Creighton).

So we have an empty slate (este project).

A Unity scene is a big 3D world, but we would be ignoring that for now. We will be using the GUI layer, which is like “a sheet of glass” in front of our 3D world.

We will be making 2 scenes for this game. A scene is like a level or a screen in our game. So two scenes, one for the title and one for the game game.

(how organized are we)

So we are making the title screen first.

(tada!)

Of course, so far the TitleGUI script is still empty.

And we type some code (este copy paste from the book):

And we get this:

And if you clicked the button, you get a lil message:

(yeah)

The book came with some code files and assets for each chapter, packed as Unity packages, just double click on the file and it’ll import it to your project.

For the title screen, the author has prepared a cute image that we will add as a GUITexture, and so we get this:

(oh, we also changed the position of the button, so it’s front and well, not really center)

And then hook the button to some code that will bring us to the game:

Application.LoadLevel(“game”);

(yes, this short little code will bring us to the next scene, if we have our scenes added to our build settings)

Lalala… okay, time to make the actual game game.

We go to the game scene (just double click on the scene in the Project panel).

And we’ll make a GameScreen game object and a GameScript script (like what we did with the title screen).

Ooh… what codes will we fill this new script with? *copy paste some codes from the book* Okay, and read up on the explanations too.

And we get this!

(whee)

And then we are done with one chapter. Look at us, pretty good, huh.

This is an excerpt of my previous blog post.

This book is written by Ryan Henson Creighton aka Cassie the 5 yr old game developer’s dad. This book is about 380 something pages, and it takes you through Unity from the basics (as in what Unity is, what you can and cannot do *hint* MMOs unless you are really popular and has like a hundred friends or something). And then he teaches through examples, hence the title of the book. He also gives readers programming basics. All in all, the author is actually quite a fun read, because of his wit and humor, and it is nothing like my Computer Programming 1 professor, who tends to drone.

Overall, I think this book is easy read, it’s not intimidating in such a way that it bombards you with information, code bits that you can’t even begin to grasp. I think that beginners, even those who have “never coded before” would find this book easy to digest, and might even be able to “build fun games”.

For those who are interested in the book, you can check it here. The book actual offers samples codes and projects that you can download even if you haven’t bought the book, here.