Hands-On Unity 2021 Game development

Hands on experience from Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo.

The author speaks about game design document and how it changes during actual game development.
Then main UI of Unity3d editor is explained and author proceed further with building of examples, which help in understanding how Unity3d engine works.
You will find good explanation how to use prefab as Unity3d assets.
Reader get good description of the structure of typical Unity3D project.
You will see usage of pro builder and in-depth description of working with shader graph.
There really big chapters on visual effects oh yeah baby!

You will find example’s how to create particle and manage different qualities of light (optimizing lighting)

This book is very ambitious, the chapter with editing of sound is amazing, all step by step tutorial, but I fear it would become obsolete one day, because how fast things in Unity changing.
This Book describes different formats of UI in Unity, and step by step explanations and amazingly this book covers animation, you will find step by step to do of how to “animate” in Unity3D.
Finally what about scripting in Unity, the author of the book covers it too!
Visual script, ok its new way to code for me, still it’s just an introduction for newbies, later it make sense to say it’s better to work with code directly. Interesting author discuss how to move Unity3D object via script.

Then, there exist a description how implement handling of player input for keyboard.
Author even mentions how to create virtual bullets for 3D first person shooter.
There a whole chapter about physics and collision in the Unity3D game engine.
Author presents even skeleton modeling, which is own art of craftsmanship.

Now to even more fun part, scripting, the code presented in this book is of a good quality, small snippets and good code styles.
Visual scripting is cool, still it can slow down a professional programmer.
In the last chapters author describes how to profile a prototype build for optimization.
All descriptions are pretty deep GPU and CPU communications and describes how exactly memory handles data in each of involved “system” parts.
Finally the reader of this book discuss how to gather feedback from the first beta testers game playtests, even there some thoughts about the publisher.

Summary: this book try to cover all possible areas of game development, I am not sure that newbies would be able to spent  so much time keeping it all together.
By any means this not encyclopedia, some of the mentioned steps in books probably would be deprecated in newer Unity versions.

Can I recommend this book?
Well I have mix feelings about this book, some parts of this book are very good and some just water boiling , still I think it is good to have a reference or when you stuck you can look up certain topics and get a probable solution for your problem.
The good part of this book you will see real code example projects. So who will benefit from this book really?
I think some intermediary folks and some junior’s gamedev Unity3D devs.
My final conclusion the book would definitely be better if author focused on scripting  part things  like organizing data structures , passing data between Unity scenes and  saving data in very pro performance way. Sure modeling and SFX potentially is full time work and I totally recognize professionals from special effects gamedev area.


One topic is not covered is unit testing, yes I am speaking of writing of unit tests for the scripts and continuous thinking how game logic should interact with Unity3D API, because way to many times Unity3D game developers getting carried way by the way how Unity handle the data and forget you can write code in such way that is a plugin like puzzle which can be exchanged by another one.
Overall this book is not bad, still I can only recommend to juniors who already working in industry, for complete newbie the overhead of information is pretty big and I am not sure that they would benefit from this book, clearly visual scripting was interesting and intriguing part of this book, but then switching to small code part wasn’t big quality step.