We have teamed up with Packt Publishing and are organizing a Giveaway. Six lucky winners stand a chance to win a copy of the best-selling books on Unity. Keep reading to find out how you can be one of the Lucky Winners.
Overview of Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials:
Kick start your game development, and build ready-to-play 3D games with ease.
Understand key concepts in game design including scripting, physics, instantiation, particle effects, and more
Read more about this book and download free Sample Chapter
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Overview of Unity iOS Essentials:
Learn key strategies and follow practical guidelines for creating Unity 3D games for iOS devices.
Learn how to plan your game levels to optimize performance on iOS devices using advanced game concepts.
Full of tips, scripts, shaders, and complete Unity 3D projects to guide you through game creation on iOS from start to finish.
Read more about this book and download free Sample Chapter
How to Enter?
All you need to do is head on over to their respective book pages ( Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials book page, Unity iOS Essentials book page) and look through the product description of these books and drop a line via a reply to this thread to let us know what interests you the most about these books. It’s that simple.
Winners from the U.S. and Europe can either choose a physical copy of the book or the eBook. Users from other locales are limited to the eBook only.
Deadline
The contest will close on 15/02/12 PT. Winners will be contacted by email, so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!
Probably the most interesting aspect of the book for me would be my interest in learning unity. Having never used unity, but having experience with other game making tools, it'd be a solid motivator for me to pick up unity and go for it. I'm also interested in tooling around with 3D, as my experience is with 2D engines for the most part.
[color="#282828"] "Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials" looks like a great read! I think what appeals most to me is the simplicity of the book since Unity3D is a very simple to use engine and I think that tutorials should follow along with that and by the looks of the layout of the chapters even, it is clear that they have been carefully thought out and it starts with the basics and steadily introduces more and more. It's great that C# and JavaScript is covered, I have been wanting to do some more scripting in Unity with C# but there is a lack of tutorials with the depth of some of the JavaScript tutorials out there.
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[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]The "Unity iOS Essentials" looks like a great book too. I don't have any experience on Unity3D with iOS or even Android so I don't know much but it looks great for its simplicity and thoroughness and by looking at the table of contents I can see it covers all the things that must be thought of in any iOS game.[/font]
I read through Unity Game Development Essentials and did the full tutorial; very comprehensive, fun, and informative. I'm looking forward to taking a look at the updated 3.X version to learn what's changed with the new version of Unity.
I only played around with Unity briefly, but I was able to notice that it makes the job of creating games a lot easier. On the other hand, learning how to use a powerful tool like Unity effectively requires time, and by reading the table of contents and the samples I can see that these books will teach me the basics and good practices of game development in Unity.
Also, since mobile gaming importance is growing every day, learning how to create games for iOS devices is definitively worth it, and knowing how to use a tool that allows the creation of both desktop and mobile games is a must for anyone wanting to work in the game development industry in the future.
I just happened to start playing with Unity the last couple of weeks and noticed the Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials was written by Will Goldstone.
His video tutorials have been very good and helpful so I'm expecting the book would be just as good.
Also the book seems to make more use of C# instead of Javascript on the coding side which is another difference.
The Unity iOS Essentials book would also be great to have especially since I have been writing native iPhone games and I'm sure this would make it a lot easier.
Does the iOS book require the Pro version of Unity though?
[size="2"]Don't talk about writing games, don't write design docs, don't spend your time on web boards. Sit in your house write 20 games when you complete them you will either want to do it the rest of your life or not * Andre Lamothe
The two books take a nice approach and look like they start off gently introducing one to the differences in the iOS devices in one book and introducing one to the 3D world.
The books will surely be useful as a good reference for making the most of the Unity engine for the casual developer and a beginner to the world of game development. Targetting the iOS will help those who want to "get rich" by making games for the iPhone & iPad devices.
The most interesting thing for me about the books would also be learning Unity. I'm familiar with Torque and I use it and have only dabbled a little with Unity. A step by step guide, especially one that talks about how to do things in C# would be really helpful to getting up and running quickly.
Also learning iOS development would be nice. I'm especially interested in the section that talks about communication with a back end server.
I am working with Unity 3D since about 8 months now and I have learned a lot of things by myself, but it happens a lot that I find better ways of doing things but it is usually to late to use them. I have also not touched a lot of what Unity has to offer and I tend to find my own ways of workarounds that are usually not the best choice.
By looking at the contents of Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials I could learn a lot about how to make HUD, better menus, how to animate better using the editor (which I've never done before) and how to optimize the game's performance. Also there a lot of tips and tricks I'm sure I do not know about in the other chapters as well.
My game (in-development) will be published on iOS devices too, and I have no experience with that, so I guess everything in Unity iOS Essentials would be useful to me. I know there are some optimization stuff I need to know and also some platform specific stuff like input methods (touch based), GUI and so on.
