David Baron - Game Development Patterns with Unity 2021

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First published: March 2019
Second edition: July 2021

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David Baron is a game developer with over 15 years of experience in the industry. He has worked for some well-known AAA, mobile, and indie game studios in Montreal, Canada. His skill set includes programming, design, and 3D art. As a programmer, he has worked on various games for various platforms, including virtual reality, mobile, and consoles.

Lucas Bertolini has 10+ years' experience as a video game software developer. He has worked on three major projects: for Pollux Ltd. (Hong Kong) as a game developer and designer; for Schell Games (Pittsburgh, US) where he moved and worked as a developer until the project was completed; and for Globant as a developer.

He has worked in technical education for 5+ years and has taught a variety of programming courses. He is the cofounder of NGA and Bytenarchy Studios, both digital services development companies that use Unity as their main technology.

Lucas has written Hands-On Game Development without Coding, available from Packt.

Mark Bonasoro grew up in the late 80s in a family with computers from a young age. In the mid-90s, Mark started building his own PCs. His interest in game development started when he used Softimage on a Silicon Graphics machine in high school. Mark's programming skills ramped up in the 2000s when he started college, using C++ to make business applications, and worked in a small indie game company using a 3D multiplatform game engine, still in circulation, called Intrinsic Alchemy. In 2006, Mark started a game studio, as an excuse to learn with his classmates to make mobile games for Java 2 Micro Edition-featured phones for Sony Ericsson and Nokia. He graduated in software engineering in 2010 from Concordia University and worked as a Unity developer for Affordance Studios producing educational games.

The preceding quote is from one of my favorite films and sums up my approach to learning. Following over a decade working in the gaming industry, I have found that the only proper way to gain mastery over a complex system is by breaking it down into its most basic components. In other words, I try to understand the core ingredients before mastering the final form. Throughout this book, you will see that I'm taking a simplistic, but contextual, approach in presenting each pattern.

The goal is not to dumb down the subject matter but learn by isolating the core concepts behind each design pattern so that we can observe them and learn their intricacies. I've learned this approach in the gaming industry while working as a designer and programmer. We will often build components and systems for our game in isolated levels that we call gyms . We would spend weeks iterating, testing, and adjusting each ingredient of our game individually until we understood how to make them work as a whole. I wrote this book in a way that's consistent with how I approach game development so you, as a reader, can immerse yourself in the subject matter while adopting some good habits along the way that will help you in your career.

However, it is also important to state that the content of this book is not the ultimate reference regarding patterns in Unity. It's just an introduction to the subject matter, not the final destination of the learning process. I'm not presenting myself as the foremost expert and do not wish my words to become gospel among developers. I'm just a developer trying to find an elegant way of using standard software design patterns in Unity and want to share what I discovered. Therefore, as the reader, I encourage you to critique, research, customize, and improve upon everything presented throughout this book.

While writing this book, I decided on a specific mental model of my target audience, for the main reason that it's almost impossible to write a book about game development and satisfy every potential type of reader, primarily because game development is a diverse industry and there are so many types of platforms and genres, each with their specific characteristics, that I cannot take into account in a single book. So I decided on focusing the content on a particular kind of audience, which I can describe as follows:

The target audience is game programmers who are currently working on a mobile or indie game project in the Unity engine and who are in the process of refactoring their code to make it more maintainable and scalable. The reader should have a basic understanding of Unity and the C# language.