Learning 2D Game Development with Unity: A Hands-On Guide to Game Creation

The Unity Engine Tutorial for Any Game Creator

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Unity is now the world’s #1 game engine, thanks to its affordability, continuous improvements, and amazing global community. With Unity, you can design, code, and author your game once, and then deploy it to multiple platforms, reaching huge audiences and earning maximum returns. Learning 2D Game Development with Unity® will help you master Unity and build powerful skills for success in today’s game industry. It also includes a bonus rundown of the new GUI tools introduced in Unity’s version 4.6 beta.

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With this indispensable guide, you’ll gain a solid, practical understanding of the Unity engine as you build a complete, 2D platform-style game, hands-on. The step-by-step project will get you started fast, whether you’re moving to Unity from other engines or are new to game development.

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This tutorial covers the entire development process, from initial concept, plans, and designs to the final steps of building and deploying your game. It illuminates Unity’s newly integrated 2D toolset, covering sprites, 2D physics, game scripts, audio, and animations. Throughout, it focuses on the simplest and lowest-cost approaches to game development, relying on free software and assets. Everything you’ll need is provided.

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Register your book at informit.com/title/9780321957726 to access assets, code listings, and video tutorials on the companion website.

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Learn How To

• Set up your Unity development environment and navigate its tools
• Create and import assets and packages you can add to your game
• Set up game sprites and create atlas sheets using the new Unity 2D tools
• Animate sprites using keyframes, animation controllers, and scripting
• Build a 2D game world from beginning to end
• Establish player control
• Construct movements that “feel right”
• Set up player physics and colliders
• Create and apply classic gameplay systems
• Implement hazards and tune difficulty
• Apply audio and particle effects to the game
• Create intuitive game menus and interface elements
• Debug code and provide smooth error handling
• Organize game resources and optimize game performance
• Publish your game to the web for others to see and play

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Matthew Johnson is a principal 3D artist at Firebrand Games in Merritt Island, Florida. He graduated with a BFA from the International Academy of Design, where he trained in computer animation before going on to study animation at Animation Mentor.

Matthew has been in game development for the past seven years working on more than a dozen AAA racing games, such as NASCAR, Hot Wheels, and the Need for Speed series. He has helped publish titles on almost every platform, including PC, Wii U, iOS, Android, and Steam.

In his spare time Matthew enjoys spending time with his wife and two kids and, when he finds time, pursuing his love for photography.

James A. Henley is an experienced game developer who has worked on several major titles and franchises, including Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Star Wars, and Skylanders, over the past decade. He originally entered the industry via the Neverwinter Nights modding community, where he was able to indulge his desires to craft content, tell stories, and write code all at the same time. He turned that love into a job opportunity at BioWare, where he spent three years with the Edmonton studio and five more with the Austin studio in a variety of design roles before briefly working for Activision.

Currently, James is working as an independent developer on [TITLE REDACTED] and is actively live streaming to share his love of games and game design in an interactive fashion. He may or may not also be a mad scientist. Analysis has proven inconclusive.