Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition

Table of Contents

Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

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Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code 

Downloading the color images of this book 

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Overview

Getting assets

Unity's 2D features

2D mode versus 3D mode

Working with sprites

Sprite Renderer

Sprite Editor

Sprite sheets

Texture atlases

Physics 2D

Changes to Unity 5

Licensing

Component access

Animator changes

Audio mixing

Summary

2. Building Your Project and Character

Project overview and structure

Project overview

Structure

Asset naming

Creating the project

Creating a scene

Sprite system

Importing sprites

Texture Type - Sprite (2D and UI)

Sprite Mode - Single/Multiple/Polygon

Packing Tag

Pixels Per Units

Pivot

Generate Mip Maps

Filter Mode

Default settings and per-platform overrides

Sprite Editor

Sprite slicer

Automatic

Grid By Cell Size and Grid By Cell Count (Manual)

View controls

Sprite region manipulation

Importing our main character

GameObjects and components

Sprite GameObjects

Bringing our hero into the scene

Classes

MonoDevelop

The object-orientated design

The game structure

The common game object

The player object

Planning behaviors

Behaviors for the common game object

Coding with components

Accessing components

Referencing a component

Controlling the hero

Going further

Summary

3. Getting Animated

Fundamentals of sprite animation

Animation clips

Animation Dope Sheet

The time/recording controls (1)

Animation drop-down selection (2)

The sample rate (frames per second) (3)

Animation properties (4)

Timeline (5)

Curve view (6)

The Animation Controllers

The Animator component

Animating the main character

Adding your first Animation Clip

Setting up the Animator and default state

Adding the other Animation Clips

Planning the animation transitions

Connecting the animation states

Accessing controllers from a script

Making her stop animating and face the correct direction

Going further

Summary

4. The Town View

Backgrounds and layers

To slice or not to slice

The town background

The town buildings and roads

The extra scenery

Building the scene

Adding the town background

Sprite sorting layers

Sprite Sorting Order

Updating the scene sorting layers

Building out the scene

Working with the camera

Comparing Update, FixedUpdate, and LateUpdate

Moving our camera with the player

The perils of resolution

Setting our aspect ratio and camera parameters

Transitioning and bounds

Towns with borders

Journeying onward

Going further

Summary

5. Working with Unitys UI System

UI Canvas

EventSystem

Canvas Render Mode

Screen Space - Overlay

Screen Space - Camera

World Space

Using multiple Canvases

UI Text and Images

UI Text

UI Image

UI Layout and Rect Transform

Rect Tool

Pivot

Anchors

UI Buttons

Transition types

Text child

On Click ()

Going further

Summary

6. NPCs and Interactions

Considering an RPG

Advanced programming techniques

Singletons and managers

The manager approach - using empty GameObjects

The singleton approach - using the C# singleton pattern

Communicating between GameObjects

Delegates

The configurable method pattern

The delegation pattern

Compound delegates

Events

Messaging

A better way

Background tasks and coroutines

Enter coroutines

IEnumerator

Yielding

Starting coroutines

Closing the gap

Serialization and scripting

Saving and managing asset data

Using the serialized files in the editor

Accessing the .asset files in the code

Adding NPCs and a conversation system to our game

Let the player walk around the NPC

Stopping the player from walking through the NPC

Getting the NPCs talking

The conversation object

Saving and serializing the object for later

The conversation component

Building a basic conversation system

The manager

Starting a conversation

Preparing the UI

Displaying the conversation

Connecting the dots

Going further

Summary

7. The World Map

The larger view

Types of map

Fixed maps

Generated maps

In-game generated maps

Going procedural

Creating our game's map

Adding the world map

Adding a player prefab to the overworld

Adding places of interest

Leaving town

Creating a NavigationManager script

Blocking off paths

Updating build settings to include new scenes

Changing scenes

Returning to town

Updating the NavigationManager script

Going further

Summary

8. Encountering Enemies and Running Away

Event systems

Exploring randomness

True randomness

Planning for random code/generation

Basic Artificial Intelligence

State machines

Defining states

Simple singular choice

Planning for multiple cases

State managers

Sensors

Setting up your battle scene

Building the new scene

Adding the first enemy

Spawning the Dragons

Creating the BattleManager

Allowing the player to run away

Starting the battle

Saving the map position

Stop immediately re-entering battle

Going back to town

Going further

Summary

9. Getting Ready to Fight

Setting up our battle state manager

The battle state manager

Getting to the state manager in the code

Starting the battle

Introductory animation

Efficient RPG UI overlays

The adventurer's overlay

A context-sensitive overlay

Modern floating UI approach

Balancing the need

Bring on the GUI

Laying out the HUD

Displaying the correct buttons

Going further

Summary

10. The Battle Begins

Designing an interesting battle system

Leveling up

Balancing

Preparing to attack a single enemy

Beefing up the enemy AI

The enemy profile/controller

Updating the Dragon prefab

Setting up the enemy profile in the code

Selecting an attack

Adding a visual effect to attack selection

Selecting a target

The selection circle prefab

Adding selection logic to the EnemyController class

Attack! Attack!

Using particle effects to represent an attack

Creating the materials for the particle effects

Adding the particles

Displaying the particles upon attack

Finishing up the battle

Going further

Summary

11. Shopping for Items

Why do we shop?

The power of an item

Building your shop

Laying out your inventory

Rule of 99'

Encumbrance systems

Slot-based systems

A mini game

Real world

Creating a shop and inventory

Gathering shop assets

Building the shop scene

Creating inventory items

Managing the shop

Updating the player inventory definition

Stocking the shop

Linking up the buttons

Turning off the Buy Button

Entering the shop

Leaving the shop

Managing your inventory

Adding objects to the player's inventory

Going further

Summary

12. Sound and Music

Choosing the appropriate sound and music

Where to get sound and music for your game

Free resources

Audio listeners and audio sources

Adding background music

Creating a splash screen

Adding the audio source

Transitioning to the next scene

Keeping the music after the scene transition

Adding sound effects

Adding a sound to the buy button

Muting/unmuting audio

Going further

Summary

13. Putting a Bow on It

Building in-game menu structures

The screens

Splash screens

Loading screens

The main menu

Save slots/level selections

Settings pages

The About screen

Privacy policy

Pause screens

Additional menus (purchasing, achievements, leaderboards, and so on)

Social

The flow

Finishing our splash screen

Building our start screen

Extending the editor

The property drawers

Examples property drawers

Built-in property drawers

Custom property drawers

Custom editors

The editor window

Gizmos

Building your editor menus

Adding a MenuItem attribute

Enabling/disabling a MenuItem attribute

Adding shortcut keys to a MenuItem attribute

Adding contextual MenuItems

Running scripts in the Editor folder

Alternative approaches

The [InitialiseOnLoad] attribute

Editor application callbacks

Mixing it up

Working with settings

Using PlayerPrefs

Serializing your data

Saving data to disk

Backing up to the Web

Going further

Summary

14. Deployment and Beyond

Handling platform differences

Preprocessor directives

Pushing code from Unity

Processing assets

Processing the build

Building your assets

Packaging gotchas

Distributing to mobile

Social network integration

Monetization

Paid

Paid with trial

Ad supported

In-app purchases

In-game currency

Going further

Summary

Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition

Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2014

Second edition: October 2016

Production reference: 1071016

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-345-6

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Credits

About the Authors

Dr. Ashley Godbold is a programmer, game designer, artist, mathematician, and teacher. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, a Master of Science in Mathematics, a Bachelor of Science in Game Art and Design, and a Doctor of Computer Science in Emerging Media, where her dissertation research focused on educational video game design.  She works full-time as a game developer and also runs a small indie/passion studio. She teaches college courses in Unity, 3ds Max, Adobe Flash, game design, and mathematics.

I would like to thank my husband, Kyle, and my daughter, Claire, for supporting me after I made the crazy decision to write a book and a dissertation at the same time. I would also like to thank my good friend, Danny Rich, for being the person with whom I initially set out to learn Unity and for helping me with character art in this book.

I'd also like to thank everyone at Packt Publishing for helping me through this process, particularly Smeet Thakkar, Prashanth G Rao, and Sushant Nadkar for all of their help through this process.

Simon Jackson has been a tinkerer, engineer, problem solver, and solution gatherer ever since his early years. In short, he loves to break things apart, figure out how they work, and then put them back together; usually better than before.

He started way back when with his first computer, the Commodore Vic20. It was simple, used a tape deck, and forced you to write programs in Basic or assembly language; those were fun times. From there, he progressed through the ZX Spectrum +2 and the joyous days of modern graphics, but still with the 30-minute load times from a trusty tape deck. Games were his passion even then, which led to many requests for another gaming machine, but Santa brought him an Amstrad 1640, his first PC. From there, his tinkering and building exploded, and that machine ended up being a huge monstrosity with so many add-ons and tweaked fixes. He was Frankenstein, and this PC became his own personal monster crafted from so many parts. Good times.

This passion led him down many paths, and he learned to help educate others on the tips and tricks he learned along the way; these skills have equipped him well for the future.

Today, he would class himself as a game development generalist. He works with many different frameworks, each time digging down and ripping them apart, and then showing whoever would listen through his blog, videos, and speaking events how to build awesome frameworks and titles. This has been throughout many generations of C++, MDX, XNA (what a breath of fresh air that was), MonoGame, Unity3D, The Sunburn Gaming Engine, HTML, and a bunch of other proprietary frameworks—he did them all. This gives him a very balanced view of how to build and manage many different types of multiplatform titles.

He didn't stop there as he regularly contributed to the MonoGame project, adding new features and samples, and publishing on NuGet. He also has several of his own open source projects and actively seeks any new and interesting ones to help with.

By day, he is a lowly lead technical architect working in the healthcare industry, seeking to improve patients' health and care through better software (a challenge to be sure). By night, he truly soars! Building, tinkering, and educating while trying to push game titles of his own. One day they will pay the bills, but until then, he still leads a double life.

I would like to thank my family above all, my wife, Caroline and my four amazing children (Alexander, Caitlin, Jessica, and Nathan), for putting up with me and giving me the space to write this title as well as my other extravagances—they truly lift me up and keep me sane. They are my rock, my shore, my world.

I would also like to thank Jamie Hales of PixelBalloon who generously donated some content for the Appendix and gave me new ideas and insights to look into.

A big shout out to all the guys who ran and helped me out with the Unity porting events, which I supported throughout the course of this book, namely Lee Stott, Simon Michael, Riaz Amhed, Louis Sykes, Ben Beagley, Josh Naylor, Mahmud Chowdhury, and Michael Cameron. Also, the Unity evangelists who were badgered throughout the events and were pumped for hidden details: Joe Robins and Andy Touch. Truly a great crowd to get game developers energized and their titles onto as many platforms as possible. Lots of weekends lost to writing, but the book was better, for they led to so many different experiences.

Finally, thanks to the reviewers of this title who kept me grounded and on target, although that didn't help to keep the page count low—thanks for your support guys.

About the Reviewer

Claudio Scolastici is a game designer with a background in Psychology, Cognitive Science and AI. He is currently a game designer for the video game and VR/AR developer SpinVector, author of cool games such as From Cheese and Artusi Cooking Time.

He is also a guest tutor at Digital Tutors/Pluralsight and a book author for Packt.

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Preface

The Unity engine has revolutionized the gaming industry, by making it easier than ever for indie game developers to create quality games on a budget. Hobbyists and students can use this powerful engine to build 2D and 3D games, to play, distribute, and even sell for free! Unity 4.3 dramatically reformed the way developers could create 2D games when they included sprite rendering, 2D physics, and sprite key-frame animation. Unity 4.6 further shook the gaming world by adding a new and elegant UI system that perfectly complimented the 2D games developers began creating. Now, Unity 5 has arrived! And this text will explore all the wonderful features it has to offer for 2D game development.

In this book, you will learn how to build an RPG game framework, learning lots of tips and tricks along the way. You will start by making a character and a village for the character to interact with NPCs. Then you will develop an overworld map for the character to explore that will be loaded with enemies who randomly attack her. After that, you'll cover the process involved in setting up a turn based battle system along with all of the necessary steps for creating a functional GUI. Following that, you'll develop a shop and inventory system and then implement sound and music. By the end of this book, you will be able to architect, create, deploy, your game as well as have the knowledge to build and customize the Unity editor.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Overview. This chapter gives a basic overview of the 2D features provided within Unity 5. It also provides general guidance for finding free assets to use within 2D projects. Lastly, it points out key differences between Unity 5 and Unity 4.

Chapter 2, Building your Project and Character. This chapter covers the steps necessary to start building a project. It describes object oriented programming, how it is used in Unity, and the basic structure of a class in C# using MonoDevelop. This chapter also describes the process of importing, editing, and implementing, 2D sprites into the Unity engine, as well as the programming required to move the sprite around the screen with the player's interaction.

Chapter 3, Getting Animated. This chapter introduces animation in Unity by utilizing the various animation components. It describes the process of converting a sprite sheet to an animation clip and implementing the Animator component. It also describes the process of setting up the Animator Controller and explains how to implement animation parameters using scripting.

Chapter 4, The Town View. This chapter explains the process of setting up the town in which the character will walk around. It also explains the process of working with the camera and how to program the functionality necessary for the character to interact with her environment.

Chapter 5, Working with Unity's UI System. This chapter gives a general overview of the UI system implemented in Unity 4.6.

Chapter 6, NPCS and Interactions. This chapter covers the overall structure of interacting with non-player characters within an RPG. It then describes the process of writing and implementing the code necessary to allow the player to speak with the NPCs, and displaying the conversation utilizing the UI system.

Chapter 7, The World Map. This chapter discusses the process of building a map for the player to navigate and allowing the player character to exit the initial town.

Chapter 8, Encountering Enemies and Running Away. This chapter discusses the process of creating a battle scene that contains randomly spawning enemies. It then covers the programming required to have the player character transition in to random battles and transition back to the map by selecting the option to run away.

Chapter 9, Getting Ready to Fight. This chapter discusses the process of developing a battle introduction animation and the GUI that will allow the player to interact with the battle.

Chapter 10, The Battle Begins. This chapter further develops the battle system, by implementing the code that allows the player to select various attacks, incorporating particle systems to represent attacks, and utilizing an event system.

Chapter 11, Shopping for Items. This chapter discusses the process of creating a shop in which the player can buy items and an inventory system in which the player can save the purchased items.

Chapter 12, Sound and Music. This chapter covers the basics of sound integration utilizing audio listeners and sources, by adding background music and a sound effect when the player purchases an item.

Chapter 13, Putting a Bow on It. This chapter covers the finishing touches necessary to create a complete game. This includes packaging the game, implementing a splash screen and menu system, extending the editor, and adding a system to save the player’s data.

Chapter 14, Deployment and Beyond. This final chapter discusses how to convert the final game to a playable game.

What you need for this book

In order to follow this book, you will need the Unity game engine available at https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download.

You will need to download version 5.3 or higher. This text was written using 5.3.4. If for some reason, you want to get Unity 5.3.4 instead of the most recent version, you can get archived versions from https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive.

To get the art assets and code discussed within the book, you should download the book's support files.

Who this book is for

This book is intended for anyone looking to get started in developing 2D games with Unity 5 or anyone already familiar with Unity 2D wishing to expand or supplement their current Unity knowledge. A basic understanding of programming logic is needed to begin learning with this book, but intermediate and advanced programming topic are explained thoroughly so that coders of any level can follow along. Previous programming experience in C# is not required.

Conventions

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

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: This is done by calling DontDestroyOnLoad when you initialize the class.

A block of code is set as follows:

//Set the public property of the singleton

MySingletonManager.Instance.MyTestProperty = World Hello;

//Run the public method from the singleton

MySingletonManager.Instance.DoSomethingAwesome();

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: After selecting Create project, you'll be brought to the Editor Window

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Downloading the example code 

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Downloading the color images of this book 

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Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

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Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at questions@packtpub.com, and we will do our best to address the problem.

Chapter 1. Overview

Arguably, the most important parts of any project are knowing where to start and what tools you have in your arsenal before setting out to make your game. In this chapter, we will give a brief overview of the 2D tools offered in Unity 5 and explore the new features available to Unity 5.

Since this is the first chapter, let's cover how this book is structured. The main aim of this book is to build a fully functional, retro-style, Role-Playing Game (RPG) framework and cover all the main aspects of any good and well-rounded RPG game, including the following features:

Character development and setup

Building your main game view

A wider world view

Events and encounters

Shopping and inventory systems

Battles

We will be visiting places such as the following:

Your home town, as shown in the following screenshot:

The local shop, as shown in the following screenshot:

The outside world, as shown in the following screenshot:

Battling dragons in the dark forest, as shown in the following screenshot:

In this chapter, we will walk through the key terms used when working in 2D, as well as the big changes made in Unity 5 relevant to 2D game creation. We will kick off the next chapter by building the foundations of our project with some of the best practices in the industry, including guidance from the Unity team themselves (either direct from team members or from responses in the forums).

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Overview of Unity's 2D system

Rundown of new features provided in Unity