I need someone to recommend a good book for a C# programmer who’s new to Unity. I already have some experience with DirectX/C++ as well as MDX, XNA Framework, SlimDX and SharpDX, so I know a good bit about game development. Unity is such a rich and feature-packed environment though I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to figure out the best way to accomplish things. I find myself reinventing a lot of wheels that don’t need to be reinvented. With my past programming experience, my first inclination is to always create a C# class and start doing everything with code. Then I’ll find out I could have done exactly the same thing in 2 minutes in the editor and do a heavy facepalm …
I’ll give you a classic example of this … I wanted to do a simple FPS demo shooting an AKM (an AK-47 variant) with some tracer rounds and be able to run around and shoot and actually hit stuff with the bullets. So, I spent a long time struggling to program nice and smooth procedural weapon sway and recoil and doing all these complex lerps and vector and quaternion math, then I realized wow I could I literally do all this with a couple of clever animations, inject an animation event to call some kind of OnFire method in a script attached to the gun and make that trigger the sound, particles and bullet spawning … so I tried it that way and had it working in 20 about minutes. Of course, more complex animations on AI-controlled NPCs has become rather frustrating for me, as I can make it work but can’t seem to figure out how to design anything to be re-usable, something I’m seeking some answers to in this thread, as well:
So I’ve done a good bit of playing around and tinkering in Unity and creating some interesting stuff, and I’ve moved at a pretty fast pace. But there are still a lot of gaps in my knowledge about Unity’s features, how to use certain things how to accomplish X, Y, Z in the best possible way. I know C# like the back of my hand, so that’s not what I struggle with … I do, however, struggle with figuring out how to create good architecture that’s going to scale across a real game and how I’m going to put together a bunch of complex subsystems and build something real.
Here’s something I’ve been playing around with, creating spells and weapons and collectible items and such:
I really need a good book written by a professional Unity developer that’s going to teach me the things I need to know, but not one aimed at beginners who have never written any code. I don’t need to waste time being tutored on how to declare variables or what a delegate or abstract class is. I need to dig into the guts of Unity’s features, editor and APIs and figure out how I’m going to engineer game architecture and work on real, large projects.
If anyone can recommend something that might be suitable for me I would greatly appreciate it! I’ve watched a lot of sporadic YouTube tutorials and read bits and pieces of the documentation to get my feet wet, but I need something more structured to learn all the things a professional developer needs to know. It is, after all, my intent to get a job working with Unity …
Thanks,
Aaron
