Review: Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

I’ve been keeping tabs on Unity since back when it was a Mac only thing, and it sure has come a long way over the years. Even though I have downloaded and toyed with the program before, I hadn’t took the time to read a proper book on the engine. Now that I am having to work with Unity more for the job, I figured it was a good time to brush up on some knowledge. Although there are tons of Unity books out there, Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials seemed to have good reviews, and the price was right (only $16 for the Kindle e-book).

The book basically walks you through creating a dirt simple “game”, that you build up throughout the reading. Only the first chapter has a standalone demo to get your feet wet, the rest of the book is all one project. I found this format to work nicely, as you can concentrate on one aspect of the game design during each chapter but feel more accomplished as you built up the game. It covers creating a terrain, setting up a player controller, importing models, creating a GUI, collision detection, basic scripting to trigger events, and basically everything you would need for a simple demo. Although the game you build will not win any awards, it is functional and teaches some fundamental concepts.

What I will say is that the author did a bang-up job with the source code listings. There are tons of code snippets throughout the book and I found only one, yes one, mistake out of the whole thing. And, even then, it was a minor variable misnaming. Nothing major. This was a refreshing surprise, as many programming books are riddled with errors and non-compiling code. Bravo for that.

In general, though, I found this to be a very approachable book, even for a beginner. Of course, development experience doesn’t hurt, but it’s really not required for this text. The author clearly explains everything that is taught in the book and only at the end is some code glossed over (since it was already covered). I also liked how all the code is shown in both C# and Javascript, so the choice of language is up to the reader. Very nice.

The greatest part, I would say, is how far you can go with Unity itself in little time. I read this book in just one week and feel like I have covered more ground than I have with other engines spending *far* more time learning. So that just goes to show how solid the engine is. It’s not so much about the graphics of the engine, as it doesn’t really look any better than anything else out there. However the editor is very functional and very efficient. Especially nice is how you can create references to objects in the editor, greatly simplifying communication between different components. Overall I found it to be a great learning experience.

If you are just starting out with game development then this book is a great resource for learning the Unity engine. If you are already a developer but not familiar with Unity, this is also a great text. Granted, its not a very advanced book, so if you are already using Unity you can probably pass on it. That said, the book was very affordable and well worth the money in my opinion.