Unity iOS Essentials

Develop high performance, fun iOS games using Unity 3D

• 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.

In Detail

Unity is the perfect tool for creating games for a number of platforms. Whether it’s for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or some combination of the three, this book takes a practical approach which maximizes performance while maintaining maximum compatibility across the entire mobile device line up.

Unity iOS Essentials takes you through all aspects of Unity 3D game development for iOS. Mobile game development means thinking about mobile performance, multiple device screen resolutions, deploying a single application to multiple devices, understanding .NET integration, taking advantage of advanced lighting and culling systems, and integrating a mobile game with a server back end. This comprehensive book on developing Unity 3D games for iOS covers it all and demonstrates the concepts using practical tips, scripts, shaders, and projects.

Learn how to plan for supporting multiple iOS devices before you start writing your first script. Consider performance and advanced game topics that will speed up your game development while solving real world problems. Add GUIs, use sophisticated .NET programming concepts, and examine scripts and shaders, interact with servers, and interact with projects that deal with real issues. Unity iOS Essentials provides you with a fully illustrated and fully commented guide for realising your game idea using advanced concepts that work on the iOS family of mobile devices.

What you will learn from this book

• Plan and organize game levels to work on the various iOS devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
• Important iOS performance considerations and how iOS platforms differ from desktop platforms.
• Develop games that work with multiple device screen resolutions and orientations.
• Manage sophisticated game state and user preferences.
• Essential .NET classes.
• Develop a four wheeled vehicle with realistic physics.
• Deal with the various methods of culling available in Unity 3D for iOS.
• Integrate Unity3D for iOS games with servers to store things like high scores and achievements.

Approach

You will start by considering the essential differences between mobile and desktop game development. You will then get straight into creating unity projects that will run on the entire spectrum of iOS devices

Who this book is written for

This book is for people who want to plan, develop, and deploy Unity 3D games on iOS mobile platforms, including iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Anyone who has experience with the free desktop version of Unity 3D can pick up this book and learn how to take the desktop skills and optimize them to work on the mobile iOS platforms. Some of the features in this book discuss the Pro features of Unity 3D for iOS so a Pro license is required to use some of the features (notably Occlusion Culling and Beast Light mapping.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Planning Ahead for a Unity3D iOS Game
Chapter 2: iOS Performance Guide
Chapter 3: Advanced Game Concepts
Chapter 4: Flyby Background
Chapter 5: Scalable Sliding GUIs
Chapter 6: Preferences and Game State
Chapter 7: The Need for Speed
Chapter 8: Making it real
Chapter 9: Putting it all together