Unity 5 for Android Essentials

Book excerpt: A fast-paced guide to building impressive games and applications for Android devices with Unity 5 About This Book Design beautiful effects, animations, physical behaviors, and other different real-world features for your Android games and applications Optimize your project and any other real-world projects for Android devices Follows a tutorial-based approach to learning the best practices for accessing Android functionality, rendering high-end graphics, and expanding your project using Asset Bundles Who This Book Is For This book is perfect for competent Unity developers who want to learn how to develop, optimize, and publish games for Android devices in a quick and easy manner. This book assumes basic knowledge of game design concepts and/or some experience with other game technologies such as Unreal Engine 4, CryEngine, or GameMaker. What You Will Learn Discover tips and tricks to optimize Unity scripts Create Java and native C plugins for the Android platform Access Android features and sensors inside the Unity 5 engine Render high quality graphics and optimize Cg shaders Play Legacy and Mecanim animations in Unity 5 Download new assets and code behavior while your game is running on an Android device in order to expand your game in real time Debug your games and applications on Android devices using the Unity Profiler tool In Detail Unity is a very popular and effective technology for creating 2D and 3D games and applications. The Unity rendering engine provides great real-time rendering of high quality graphics without too much cost and effort. It boasts industry leading multi-platform support and world class monetization and retention services for mobile games, making it the first choice for many game developers across the world. Unity 5 is a great starting point for game developers looking to develop stunning and robust games. Starting with a refresher on the basics of Unity 5, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom game. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of Unity 5. You will quickly explore all the major key features of the Unity 5 engine and learn to implement real-world Android game and application features in practice. We begin by introducing how to set up the Android SDK on Windows and Mac OS X and configure Unity 5 settings for the Android platform. As you progress through the chapters, you will learn to implement innovative and user-friendly features with the aid of real-world examples. You will explore how to render high quality graphics with physically-based shaders and global illumination to enhance your project's performance. Building on this, you will then learn to transform your native C# and JavaScript code into Unity scripts. Best practices to improve your Android games will also be discussed to help you create games fast and efficiently. Finally, putting together all these concepts, you will learn to create your own Android game from scratch. This book will teach you how to harness the benefits of different tools to become proficient at game design and development processes. Style and approach This book is a simple and fast-paced guide that helps you through the process of creating real-world Android games and applications with the Unity engine using step-by-step and practical examples that progressively build upon each other.