Mobile Game Development with Unity

Chapter 3. Scripting in Unity

In order for your game to work, you need to define what actually happens in your game. Unity provides you with the foundations of what you need, such as rendering graphics, getting input from the player, and playing audio; it’s up to you to add the features that are unique to your game.

To make this happen, you write scripts that get added to your game’s objects. In this chapter, we’ll introduce you to Unity’s scripting system, which uses the C# programming language.

Languages in Unity

You have a choice of languages when programming in Unity. Unity officially supports two different languages: C# and “JavaScript.”

We put JavaScript in quotes because it’s not actually the JavaScript language that you might be familiar with from the wider world. Instead, it’s a language that looks like JavaScript, but has multiple differences from its namesake. It’s different enough that it’s often called “UnityScript,” by both users of Unity and sometimes the Unity team themselves.

We don’t use Unity’s JavaScript in this book for a couple of reasons. The first is that Unity’s reference material tends to show C# examples more than JavaScript, and we get the feeling that the use of C# is preferred by Unity’s developers.

Secondly, when you use C# in Unity, it’s the same language you’ll find anywhere else, whereas Unity’s version of JavaScript is very specific to Unity. This means that it’s easier to find help about the language.

A Crash Course in C#

When writing scripts ...