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Monday 17 February 2014

Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide Review

Unity is probably the most popular game engine for mobiles right now. There are a lot of books and online tutorials on this topic, so what does this one offer? Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide will give you exactly what the title promises - beginner's guide. And it does it well.

Unity offers two main languages to develop games. C# and JavaScript. Most of the tutorials online are using JavaScript but C# is richer and more mature language. This can be both advantage and disadvantage. The book uses C# as the language of choice. But the author made sure to rewrite all examples in JavaScript too!

The book starts from the very beginning and more advanced developers can easily skip first few chapters. It goes through Unity basics and mobile basics - very useful since Unity is a multiplatform engine. Everything is explained on an example and everything explained is used in a game.

I was very surprised that the author included four complete games. Whether you want to build a simple board game, 2D scroller or 3D game, you can find an example in this book. The four games are: Tic Tac Toe, Angry Birds, 3D space shooter game and 3D tank battle. The games could use a lot of polishing, but of course that is not the purpose of the book.

Some parts of the book use Unity Pro, the paid version, but you can use the book with the free edition of Unity as well.

For more information, see Packt website. You can get the book at Amazon in paperback and kindle version.

Summary

If you are a beginner in Android game development and want to learn Unity, pick this book. It covers basics and it will give you four complete games with source codes and all assets to learn from. Perfect for people who don't like theory and prefer hands-on excercises.

Free e-book giveaway

The giveaway ended. I have three free copies of this e-book. If you want to read it, send me your name and email through this form. Optionally tell me why do you want the book, too. Three emails will be randomly selected from the submissions. The winners' details will be shared with Packt and they will contact them about the book. The contest ends on 28th February.
Martin Varga is a Czech software developer who likes pygmy owls (hence Kulíš), running, ramen, travelling and living in foreign countries. He is also known as smartus or sm4 on the internet (read as smartass, but there are too many of them). He currently tries to make games in AndEngine like Mr. Dandelion's Adventures and hangs around a lot at the AndEngine forums.