Unity Development Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Scripting

Creating behaviors in Unity means writing code, or scripting. Scripts in Unity are written in C# (pronounced “C sharp”). C# was originally developed by Microsoft, and has since evolved to include a full, fantastic open source implementation, which Unity makes extensive use of.

Warning

We strongly recommend that you review Chapter 1 before you work through any of the recipes in this chapter!

This book isn’t going to try to give you a complete guide to programming, or a complete guide to programming in C#—that’d be a whole other book. Instead, we’ll show you how to write scripts for use in Unity, using C# as the language.

Note

There are other languages you can use to write code in Unity. For example, there are a number of bindings to other languages, and Unity supports a range of visual scripting tools that we’ll touch on in other chapters, but that are beyond the scope of this book.

If you’re interested in learning C# in a broader sense, we strongly recommend C# 7.0 in a Nutshell by Ben and Joseph Albahari (O’Reilly), as well as Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene (O’Reilly).

2.1 Adding a Script to an Object in a Unity Scene

Problem

You want to add scripts to your game objects, so that you can give them behavior using C# code.

Solution

Unity game objects are containers for components. A MonoBehaviour—named for Mono, the scripting runtime that Unity uses—is a script component. When a Mono​Be⁠haviour is attached to a game object, it participates ...