Matt Smith - Unity 2018 Cookbook

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First published: June 2013
Second edition: October 2015
Third edition: August 2018

Production reference: 1310818

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Not so long ago, developing professional quality games meant licensing an expensive game engine or writing your own from scratch. Then, you needed to hire a small army of developers to use it. Today, game engines like Unity have democratized game development to the point where you can simply download the tools and start making the game of your dreams right away.

Well... kinda. Having a powerful game creation tool is not the same thing as having the technical knowledge and skills to use it effectively.

I've been developing games and game tools professionally for over 15 years. When I first took the plunge into learning Unity development to create the Fungus storytelling tool, I found a huge amount of online documentation, tutorials, and forum answers available for Unity developers. This makes getting started with Unity development relatively easy, but the information can also be quite fragmented. Often, the last piece of the puzzle you need is buried 40 minutes into an hour-long tutorial video or on the 15th page of a forum thread. The hours you spend looking for these nuggets of wisdom is time that would be better spent working on your game.

The beauty of the Unity Cookbooks is that Matt and Chico have distilled this knowledge into a neat collection of easy-to-follow recipes, and they have provided the scripts and complete working projects so that you can put it to use straight away.

In this latest edition for Unity 2018, Matt has updated the recipes from the previous book and added hundreds of new pages to introduce many of the latest Unity features. These include topics such as Shader Graphs, Virtual-Reality projects, 2D and 360-degree Video Players, Cinemachine, in-game geometry building with ProBuilder, and Unity Technologies' 2D and 3D GameKits.

Getting started with Unity development is free and easy. When you're ready to take your skills to the next level, this book is an effective way to do just that. It covers a great deal in its hundreds of pages, and if you can master even half of what's here, you'll be well on the way to becoming a great Unity developer!

Chris Gregan

Chief Architect, Romero Games: https://www.romerogames.ie/

Author of Fungus: http://fungusgames.com

Matt Smith is a computing academic at what will soon become the Technological University of Dublin, Ireland.

Matt started computer programming on a brand new ZX80 and submitted two games for his computing O-level exam. After nearly 10 years as a full-time student on a succession of scholarships, he gained several degrees in computing, including a PhD in computational musicology.

In 1985, Matt wrote the lyrics and was in the band whose music appeared on the B-side of the audio cassette carrying the computer game Confusion. Matt is a documentation author for the open source Fungus Unity project.

With his children, he studies and teaches tae kwon do, and all three of them are beginning guitar lessons in 2018.

Jate Wittayabundit is a Sr Unity developer at WGames based in Toronto, Canada. He loves puzzle games and animation movies. For many years, he has been working as a Sr/lead game developer for many titles, including children's games, such as Dora, Paw Petrol, and such. He was also an author of Unity 3 and 4 Game Development Hotshot, and a technical reviewer for Unity 4.x Cookbook, Packt Publishing. In his spare time, he loves to paint and work on 3D software, such as Zbrush or 3D Studio Max. He also loves painting and drawing.