Unity 2D Game Development Paperback – March 18, 2014

I'm on the last leg of my first 2D game so I have been thru a number of tutorials and books and figured Id buy this book to add to my collection. It will serve as a reference to any platform game design if I ever decide to take that route. But this book is paper thin with 128 pages. Ive had bigger comic books when I was kid. lolThis book should sell for $12 maybe $15 w/ free shipping.

easy start to learn. remove the fear for the beginner.step by step. it' great and nice.but the code printed, there are some placeincorrect and different from the code upload.

This isn't Unity 2D Game development. This is just instructions for how to paste in some code someone else wrote. You're really not going to learn much from this book. It does say you need to know C#, suggesting that you will learn to apply that knowledge to Unity. Well, it also assumes you know Unity fairly well, since it tells you nothing you can't learn in five minutes with the Unity documentation and mostly consists of code snippets with no actual learning attached. If you already know Unity and C#, which is what is required to get the most out of this book, I don't think you'll be buying it.For someone with less who doesn't bring knowledge of quartenions, Vector3s or unity itself, there is no useful instruction here. Any details about applying your knowledge to Unity, and how to manage GameObjects outside of the exact code provided are lacking. If you're pretty good with code and just want to see some samples of a 2D platformer, this might work for you. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

I have reviewed this book in exchange for a free book.Prerequisites: some Unity, certain amount of C# scripting (esp. events, delegates) I wanted to learn how to make a 2D game with Unity. This book was helpful & under 120pgs , it covered important concepts to get started. The book should have been longer though to explain more things. You build a simple platform game with side-scrolling & the author lists other ideas that can be used in the game. It is easy reading in many parts. I practiced with a lot of the book & encountered some difficulties. I've listed some Errata/Notes in this review. Towards the end of the book, you add an enemy boss which makes use of list nodes & event timers. It has different states to do things like: being not visible till you get so many enemies, upon activated, it drops down from the sky when it lands at a location, there are particles of smoke around it it animates (wiggles) it jumps to different platforms after a period of time after it's hit a certain number of times by player it dies & it emits particlesSome Favorites: vortex animation ; applying 2D particlesEnjoyable & Recommended! Errata/Notes: Download Source Code: pertains to FOLDER: 2564_Code_140221_updated 1. pg 12 reads: look for the labeled Player in the Animations directory this file is in Characters folder which is in the Textures folder 2. I used the script files as is to start with when I first encountered them in the book. For the ones that caused console errors, I think I only needed to comment out the code the errors referred to on those scripts & then they worked. Suggestion: do 1 script at a time, & tell apart these errors from other unrelated unresolved errors that still exist in the console.3. MegaGrab Folder: not mentioned in book; script which allows to grab upscaled &anti-aliased screen shots; you can do real prints of game for posters & other things..Read the readme.txt where I took this info. from to learn more about it. EBook: 1. Values like for sprite, its collider ; needed adjustment to be in correct position (don't know how often, but this info. should be re-checked 2a. using 2D sprite in a particle system: The book didn't go into it in full. Steps are:1. Create Particle System which is a GameObject2 .Create Material -assign the 2D sprite to it; In its Shader : find & select- Particles - Alpha Transparent Blend3. Assign this material to the Particle System ; your 2D particles show now4. you can create a Prefab for this Another way which I didn't test but I think should work too: after Step 1 , could just drag & drop the 2D sprite into the Particle System Object which you then skip Steps 2 & 3.__________________________________________________________________ 2b. to see particle(s) in game : check off Play on Awake in the Particle System Component

I bought this book in the hopes of helping bridge the gap from XNA over to Unity. Unfortunately, this was not the book I was looking for. This is a fairly thin book with even thinner explanation or reason why the author is doing what they do. Leaving the expectation that the reader is to just copy wholesale from the book, without question or concern. Even at endgame, the final product isn't all that elaborate and leaves a lot of questions on the table.I personally would have loved to see more topics covered or even more explanation of what was there. That said, I cannot recommend this book as I don't see the utility it possesses.

I quite like this book (I have not completed it at time of writing).As other comments stated, it is a book where you copy and paste the code. I went about typing it by hand and because this book is written for unity 4.6 and I am using Unity 5 and there are some parts of the code I had to troubleshoot because of the differences in versions. I found that to be a very productive exercise. If you are new to unity 2d game dev or getting ready for your first GameJam then I would practice with this book and from that I would evolve the code base (platform, isometric or top-down games) and learn from.

Code books that allow a novice to follow the steps to make a program without actually knowing what you're doing aren't uncommon. They can let a student tweak a working model and learn how tweak stable code without breaking it. That isn't possible with this book. Following the steps in the first chapter, I had to fix typos in the code it told me to type, and remove large chunks from an imported file before I could test code the book expected to compile without errors.This is the literary equivalent of shovelware. The book clearly wasn't tested and was released to be the first book talking about Unity's native 2d support. If you want to learn about making 2d games in Unity, try their free tutorials or wait for a professional group to release a book.

mmm a bit useless book, all the explamples you can find it in the unity page, nothing new

If you're at least Intermediate experiences in OOP and C#, this book is totally useless. And I insist on being more then a beginner at programming as the book focuses on such subjects as Delegates and State Machines. So while the techniques used in this book are good, you will find yourself very confused by the time you finish the first chapter.However, my biggest convern is how crap the code segments found in the book. The code is not properly structured and required you to download the code directly from the Packt.So if your an Intermediate experienced programmer you will defintely find some benefir to this book. But if you have minimal programming exprerience I would highly recommend staying away from this book.

Written in a friendly tone, this book's text is completely let down by the code samples and the structure of the project examples. The printed code samples have absolutely no indentation (which is completely unforgivable and makes the publisher look like amateurs) and contain numerous errors, and by page twenty five you're forced to blindly import code from the supplied code samples, which unfortunately depends on features not yet implemented in other scripts printed in the book. The result is that you end up pulling in more code from the finished project to make things work, and so are skipping forward in the project, using concepts that haven't yet been introduced.

The book illustrates many basic techniques of 2D Game development. It guides you through the steps of building a 2D platformer game in a simple, very hands-on manner. Unfortunately, the examples are not very well printed and some bugs in the code might put you off if you are not a seasoned programmer. The downloadable code samples are essential to work your way through those pitfalls.

It sucks, that you have to look up stuff in the code examples, which you first have to download, for which you first have to generate an account.Even worse though, is that in one of the earliest parts you need those examples, but they only have the script in the state of the finished program. So it's almost impossible to read, when you just try to find the parts that you need to make the scripts work at all. The book is obviously not printed very expensively, so why could they not fit that in there? For the start, it's only a few variables missing.Really weird decision. That makes the process of getting started pretty frustrating and for complete newcomers, might make it impossible to even get past page 24 or so.I like that they go about building a state machine, that way to program your game seems really useful. But the way it is presented here is just not well executed.

A decent book that sadly shares an all to common problem. Unity is now in v5.5 and this book is written for v4.# which the differences have been a bit of a thing. As well this book will require you to sign up on their website in order to download files and png s you will need. The download itself actual took a bit of effort to hunt down and was not very clearly stated how to go about it. Basically had to figure it out for myself. Those hiccups aside I'm still able to make use of this book to help learn.