Mobile Game Development with Unity

Chapter 1. Introducing Unity

To kick off our exploration of the Unity game engine, we’ll start with the basics: what Unity is, what it’s useful for, and how to get it. At the same time, we’ll set up some useful constraints for the subject material we’re looking at in this book; after all, you’re holding a book that claims to be about mobile development, not all development. Such a book would be much heavier, or would make your reading software crash. We aim to spare you this misfortune.

Hello, Book

Before we dive into Unity itself, let’s take a closer look at what we’re talking about here: the field of mobile games.

Mobile Games

So, what is a mobile game, and how is it different from any other sort of game? More practically, how do these differences factor into your decisions when you’re both designing and later implementing a game?

Fifteen years ago, a mobile game was likely to be one of two things:

• An incredibly simple game, with minimal interactions, graphics, and complexity

• A much more complex affair, available only on specialized mobile gaming consoles, and created by companies with access to expensive dev kits for said mobile gaming consoles

This split was the result of both hardware complexity and distribution availability. If you wanted to make a game that was in any way complex (and by complex we mean featured the incredible ability to have more than one thing moving on the screen at a time), you needed the more advanced computing power available only on expensive ...