Summary

Together we went over several key areas to begin your journey to game development. In this chapter, we laid the foundation for what is to come by going over some key fundamentals features of three primary topics:

Third Dimension

We went over the coordinate system which led into world and local space. This allowed us to talk about vectors, which is used to denote position, rotation, scale, and many other data points in development. We talked about the role of cameras and how they allow you to be the storyteller their their lens. We went through the facets of 3D meshes and how polygons are made up of vertices, edges, faces. These meshes can then be colored by materials which are driven by shaders and informed by textures. We then ended on the basics of rigid body physics and the collision detection which accompanies it. This was enough of the basics to allow us to get into Unity concepts.

Unity Concepts

To get into how Unity works, we needed to talk about the object oriented nature of the application itself and understand common terminology. We started with the most fundamental of items, the asset which is all things in Unity. One primary asset is the Scene, which ends up housing and has reference to all gameobjects for the game to run with. Speaking of gameobjects, we dove into this heavily with defining what could be a gameobject and why it matters! Following this, we explained how gameobjects could house components with multiple properties and one of which you can script in C# to make your own properties and logic with them to create mechanics. After this, we brought up the basics of prefabs which are referenced containers with predefined properties on each gameobject. Finally, there is a package which is a unity file which houses multiple items you can place on the asset store as well as import into other projects.

Unity Interface

To end this chapter, we went through a virtual tour of the Unity interface. We looked at the scene and hierarchy view and how to view and understand the hierarchy of the parent child relationships of the game objects. Then we went into the inspector to manipulate the gameobjects that needed to be manipulated. After this we went into the project window to look at all the assets we have in the project. After that, we needed to talk about the game view to show where the game logic would take place and how it was different from the scene window. Finally, we talked over the package manager which has all the asset packages from Unity as well as the ones you’ve bought from Unity Asset Store.