Book review "Unity Game Development Essentials"
I like books. A book is always a good thing, no matter how abundant online resources are. It's always at hand, with all the information brought together in one place, not scattered across different sites or even worst, across different forum threads.
When I learned a couple of months ago that Will Goldstone was writing a book on Unity3D, I was pleasantly surprised. A bit later Packt, the publisher of the book, contacted me asking for a review.
In the meantime the book hit the shelves, and there was some buzz on Twitter, so there's a good chance you've already heard about it. If you are still wondering whether you should buy it, keep reading.
Great for beginners
The book is written in the form of one big tutorial. The author leads us through different parts of the Unity3D IDE in the course of creating a simple game. The word "simple" is key here. Before I had the chance to read the book I went through the Unity3D official tutorial which has a similar structure. It presents us with a very cool 3D artwork and a pretty complex game to build. Compared to that, what we will create with the book is pretty basic. However, in this case: simpler means better.
After completing the official tutorial I felt I merely scratched the surface, and many parts of it were too complex to follow. The book doesn't leave you with this feeling. You'll be guided in creating a game but you will do it from scratch and all the steps are explained in depth.
Scripting
I assume most readers of this blog are familiar with programming. In this case you may find the code presented in the book somewhat rudimentary. One way of making it more fun is to translate the code from JavaScript into C# on the way. I did that, and I think it's much more beneficial than just copy-pasting. At least you will read it that way.
Furthermore, Actionscript 3 programmers can find that some examples are bending the rules of strict OOP. Again, for a seasoned AS3 developer, restructuring the code in those places can be another good exercise.
The book covers obviously more than just scripting. Among other topics, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on particle systems and on 2D GUI (as you will find out, 2D GUI is the weird part of Unity)
Other ressources
An indispensable companion of the book is the Unity scripting reference. The docs are solid and in most cases you'll find what you're looking for. Not always however, and if you feel you need more info I recommend to search the forums. I am not a fan of forums overall, but I must admit that the Unity3D forum is a pretty good resource.
A remark on the Unity3D documentation
A bit off-topic, but I will take the occasion to rant about the Unity3D scripting documentation. Not about the content, but about the form.
In the Unity3D docs the list of classes is sometimes placed on the left column, sometimes in the middle. Sometimes they are listed in alphabetical order, sometimes presented in an inheritance structure. Every property and method is presented on a separate page, which is a big waste of space given the fact that most of them have max 2-3 lines of description. It leads to constant back/forward clicking when exploring the API. And it might get even worse when Unity will introduce namespace support.
It would be cool if the docs followed the good old Java standard, where the list of classes is always in the same place, always accessible and in alphabetical order. The properties and methods are listed in one big table, which is also much easier to browse.
OK, enough complaining, now back to the book…
Conclusion
If you want to get into Unity, it's probably a good idea to buy this book. You'll get yourself a decent introduction to the main aspects of the software. Remember that you won't learn any advanced stuff like stucturing code in large projects, writing custom shaders or making advanced physics simulations. The important thing is that the book explains all the basics leaving you well prepared to explore the rest. I enjoyed reading it and I learned quite a lot!