Learning 2D Game Development with Unity: A Hands-On Guide to Game Creation 1st Edition

I really wanted to like this book. I even pre-ordered, but it's just not well presented.First, for any book that teaches you something like coding you need access to all the example files. Someplace you can go and download all the assets and anything else you need to get through the examples in the book. This is where things broke down right away. There is no website listed in the book (or I missed it) and the book says things like "Find the Chapter2_projectFiles for this chapter". Where? No clue. There is a website on the back where you go to "register" the book (although this just takes you to the publishers page). After some hunting I found the site for the actual book and finally found a listing called "Ancillaries" (by the way who names there download page this? Very confusing and not very helpful). But all that was there was a full download called learning2dunity_project_files.zip. Nothing else (turns out they have added the chapter files since then. Not sure if they are all there but they stop at Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 asks you to open more files. Good luck). So not a great start.So now to the book. It's not quite as bad as the download files examples but it's still a mess. Examples go into FAR too much detail and cover topics that probably shouldn't be in the first 5 chapters of a book like this. Chapter 4 has a HUGE level laid out for you. It's enormous. They talk about building this huge thing, about sorting elements and adding fences that you will walk in front of. I read about grid snapping and how to lay a level out efficiently. You work with a TON of resource files (If you can figure out the downloads) and all of this before I even moved a character. It's too much too fast. Baby steps guys. I'm trying to learn Unity for the first time.Anyway. The rest of the book follows this formula. Tons of details about things but no real high level explanations. In Chapter 6 I'm already in the animation editor and creating an animation, again this is all in the beginning. I'd prefer I just attach the animation. See it work in my game and move on. You can teach me the animation editor in Chapter 20 something once I know more. Throwing it at me in Chapter 6 is just frustrating.So in summary, the book itself isn't terrible, it just doesn't work for me at all. Maybe someone else will like how it's presented. However, the download frustrations and the sloppy access to assets and files I need to get going was a killer and there isn't a good excuse.

This book is poorly organized with lessons that have incomplete details and the accompanying downloads are not in the sections they are listed to be in the book. So while you should be learning the material you are instead getting frustrated as you attempt to make the lessons line up properly. The issue with the instructions being incomplete starts right in the early chapters and I quickly found myself trying to fix an issue with the code sample as opposed to being able to learn the basics.Please make sure you are solid on the language you choose to code in before attempting to use this book.

Out of date . C# in Unity has changed drastically since then. And this is for Unity 4. There’s better, newer books out there.Or... just update the code somewhere.

I was really excited for this book as it sounded like it was exactly what I was looking for.I was actually quite disappointed but majority of that is with the poor editing and project files available for the book. I think a second edition of this book will be great.I have a few months experience now with both unity and programmer so for the most part I am a beginner.The book walks you through building a 2d side scroller game. The approach I like to take with books is to use the artwork provided in the download files and create the project myself following the book. Using that approach lead to a lot of problems as I noticed several places where the steps would tell you do something to an object that was created previously although we never actually created that object. I reread the previous chapters and sections several times to make sure I did not miss a step and it was not there.In the project files those objects were included but I would have preferred to create them myself instead of having to rely on project files included.due to the above problems I had to bounce back and forth between my project and the one downloaded which was not very fun and caused a lot of frustration as I had to search through the unity3d.com resources to find solutions to problems.There are also some problems with naming consistency in the book, some chapters will have you create objects that you already created previously but get you to name them something different, then later you will not be sure which one they are talking about.The book feels like it is geared more towards intermediate users with programming experience (I don't think you need experience, going through the scripting of unity3d.com made me feel comfortable reading the code in this book with a few exceptions in the later chapters which are more advanced). To be fair to the book it does state right at the beginning that the coding will only be briefly explained and that it expects previous programming experience.I honestly do not see how most of the issues I ran in to were not noticed by a simple read through by an editor.As a Pro one of the best things I really liked about the book was the author adding in exercises to complete at the end of each chapter, I really like the approach of giving simple challenges in each chapter that the reader has to solve on their own. (If you had trouble you could view the project files for solutions).The more advanced chapters near the end of the book were MUCH better though, the chapter on making the enemies and creating some simple AI really impressed me as well as the chapter on making a GUI. There is also an additional chapter on the new Unity UI so you get to see how to use the legacy features as well as the new ones.I am having a hard time deciding between 2 or 3 stars on this one so I am going to go with 3 stars as I feel this book has a LOT of potential once the project files are cleaned up and the editing issues mentioned above. If you are beyond the beginner stages of using 2D and C# you will most likely know how to resolve the issues yourself (and if you are not just searching unity3d.com will help find solutions).Overall I felt that I made a lot of progress with Unity and C# from this book.

Me compre este libro nada mas salir, tenia muchas ganas de leerlo por ser el más actual (aún así está escrito en la versión 4.5 y no en la 4.6 de Unity).Al leer el índice de contenidos se observa una muy buena estructura y división de los distintos temas/partes de Unity, empezando desde lo más simple como es instalar el programa; sin embargo, el desarrollo posterior no se ejecuta con demasiada fluidez...- En cada capítulo hay mucha información superficial sobre el tema que se trata; p.e. se pone a describir cada botón del menú de herramientas sin más (sin profundizar ni opinar, tal y como te lo podrías encontrar en cualquier parte).- Material para seguir el libro: Como ya han comentado, esta pésimamente apoyado por el material que exige cada capítulo (assets, sprites, carpetas, etc). En su página web no hay nada de lo que se supone que debería haber, solo un proyecto del cual, sumergiéndote en él, puedes rescatar los spritessheets y poco más :S- Poca teoría. Si me compro un libro es para obtener un conocimiento más profundo, el libro es demasiado práctico (como un tutorial de youtube) y no te dará un base sólida de lo que es el Game Development, el core o la API de Unity, aspectos de su lenguaje de programación, ni de diseño...- Inconsistencia: Hay capítulos que no se conectan bien entre ellos y otros, como en el Capitulo 6, que es internamente inconsistente; se lía a añadir y explicar el componente Animation para, más adelante, terminar usando el componente Animator lol.En fin, una mala compra, el libro físicamente es muy bonito, bien presentado y a color, pero no parece profesional, su acabado no está pulido y no se distingue apenas de cualquier otra fuente de información práctica en Unity como Youtube.

While the book starts off strong, it suffers from a lacks editing or anyone trying to follow alone.From chapter to chapter, large steps are missing forcing the reader to juggle the downloaded files to work out the missing parts.The writing style is ok, but it's not the strongest I've read.