After comparing Sams Teach Yourself, Unity Game Development in 24 Hours and Building a Game with Unity and Blender these two books, I finally decided to select the latter as the successor to Unity’s official tutorial “TANKS!” and the first official ebook for me to formally and systematically learn Unity game development. The reason is simple: this book is very thin (with only 250 pages); there is only one game development case throughout the entire book, and the game is of type A-RGP that I urgently need to learn about.

In this book, we will learn most of the knowledge required to make a complete 3D game using the industry-leading Unity game development engine and the popular modeling software Blender. This includes: learn the basic functions of this powerful combination of game development tools, and put theoretical knowledge into practice; learn how to design and make all the core elements needed in a game – from characters, to environments, props, etc.; learn how to integrate artificial intelligence into game so as to make complex and highly entertaining game; and more.

In summary, Building a Game with Unity and Blender is primarily for pure beginners who have just started to learn how to create their own games from scratch using free tools available on the Internet. It also targets those guys who have had experience in developing games but have used some other expensive tools such like Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, and so on, and now want to use currently the best combination “Unity + Blender” instead.

// What You Will Learn //

• Design and create a game concept that will determine how your game will look and how it will be played
• Construct 3D models of your game characters and create animations for them before importing them into the game
• Build the game environment from scratch by constructing the terrain and props, and eventually put it all together to form a scene
• Import and integrate game assets created in Blender into Unity—for example, setting up textures, materials, animation states, and prefabs
• Develop game structures including a game flow, user interface diagram, game logic, and a state machine
• Make the game characters move around and perform certain actions either through player inputs or fully controlled by artificial intelligence
• Create particles and visual effects to enhance the overall visual aesthetic
• Deploy the game for various types of platforms

// Table Of Contents //

1. Creating Your Game Concept
   • Job roles in game development
   • Gameplay design
   • Writing the game’s story
   • Choosing a visual style
   • The characters concept
   • The environment concept
   • Summary
2. Creating Characters
   • Downloading Blender
   • Creating the monster’s 3D model
   • Unwrapping the monster’s UV map
   • Creating the monster’s texture
   • Creating the player character’s 3D model
   • Unwrapping the player character’s UV map
   • Summary
3. Animating Your Characters
   • What is character rigging?
   • Creating a monster’s armature
   • Creating the player character’s armature
   • Weight painting
   • Animating characters
   • The 12 basic principles of animation
   • Summary
4. Creating the Environment
   • Building terrain and wall models
   • Building rock models
   • Creating rock and wall textures
   • Building grass models
   • Creating the grass texture
   • Summary
5. Integrating Your Assets into the Game
   • Basic user interface of Unity
   • Importing environment assets
   • Importing character assets
   • Summary
6. Developing the Game Structure
   • Introduction to game structure design
   • Planning the game flow
   • Designing the user interface structure
   • Player inputs and character movements
   • Creating basic artificial intelligence
   • Summary
7. Creating Levels and Game Progression
   • Creating character attributes
   • Adding in-game items and power-ups
   • Improving enemy AI
   • Adding save points
   • Summary
8. Post-Production and Visual FX
   • A basic particle system
   • Mist particles
   • Torch fire
   • Image FX
   • Quality settings
   • Summary
9. Deploying the Game
   • Build settings
   • Player Settings
   • Summary

// Book Example Codes //

• Building a Game with Unity and Blender code files (account registration required)
• Color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book (PDF)

// Download URLs //

Format	Download	Size
PDF		5.80 MB
EPUB		18.3 MB

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