Preface

As an indie or AAA game developer, you want to have your games where your customers are. More and more people buy mobile devices every year and there's no sign of this stopping any time soon. One of the big advantages of the Unity game engine is that it is cross-platform, making it easy to write your game once and then port it to other consoles with minimal changes. However, there are certain features unique to working with mobile devices, which is what this book is about.

Unity 2020 Mobile Game Development will take you on an exploration of how to use Unity when trying to deploy your content to mobile devices. Over the course of the book, we will see how to create a mobile game and then see how to deploy it to both iOS and Android. We will explore how to add input for mobile devices and have the interface adapt to the many different screen sizes that phones have. We'll then look at some ways to monetize our game by discussing Unity's in-app purchase and advertisement systems. We will also learn how to use notifications to keep users coming back to our game. Then, we will see how we can share our game with the world by enabling us to use Twitter and Facebook's SDK. Afterward, we will see how to work with Unity's analytics system and then polish our title in a number of different ways, before putting it on the Google Play and iOS app stores. Finally, we will also learn how to use Unity's new AR Foundation framework, which allows you to build future-proof AR apps.

Who this book is for

If you are a Unity game developer and want to build mobile games for iOS and Android, then this is the book for you. Previous knowledge of C# is helpful, but not mandatory.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building Your Game, covers the creation of a simple project in Unity, which we will be modifying over the course of this book to make use of features commonly seen in mobile games. This chapter will also serve as a refresher for some fundamental concepts when working in Unity.

Chapter 2, Project Setup for Android and iOS Development, will show you the setup required to deploy a project to both iOS and Android mobile devices, by installing the Java and Android SDKs for Android and configuring Xcode for iOS.

Chapter 3, Mobile Input/Touch Controls, shows a number of ways in which input can work on mobile devices. Starting off with mouse events, we will dive into recognizing touch events and gestures, as well as how to use the accelerometer and accessing information using the Touch class.

Chapter 4, Resolution-Independent UI, discusses how to build the user interface for our game, starting with a title screen, and then build the other menus that we will want to use for our future chapters.

Chapter 5, Advertising Using Unity Ads, shows how to integrate Unity's ad framework into our project and then learn how to create both simple and complex versions of advertisements.

Chapter 6, Implementing In-App Purchases, talks about how to integrate Unity's In-App Purchase (IAP) system into our project and then takes a look at how to create an IAP that is used for consumable content as well as permanent unlocks.

Chapter 7, Getting Social, shows how to integrate social media into your projects, starting off with sharing high scores using Twitter and then taking a look at how we can use the Facebook SDK in order to display our player's name and profile picture while inside our game.

Chapter 8, Keeping Players Involved with Notifications, shows how to integrate notifications into your projects starting with the setup, before creating basic notifications ahead of time, and then seeing how to customize how the notifications are presented.

Chapter 9, Using Unity Analytics, covers some of the different ways that we can integrate Unity's analytics tools into our projects, tracking custom events as well as using remote settings to allow us to tweak the gameplay without having people re-download the game from the store.

Chapter 10, Making Your Title Juicy, introduces the concept of making games juicy with 
different ways that we can integrate features of juiciness into our projects, including tweening animations, materials, and postprocessing effects, and adding particle effects.

Chapter 11, Game Build and Submission, goes over the process of submitting our game to the Google Play or iOS app stores, with tips and tricks to help the process go smoother.

Chapter 12, Augmented Reality, shows the process of adding augmented reality to your games. We start off by setting up the project and going through the installation and setup process for ARCore, ARKit, and AR Foundation. We will then see how to detect surfaces in the real world before seeing how the user can interact with their environment and how to spawn objects within an AR space.

To get the most out of this book

Throughout this book, we will work within the Unity 3D game engine, which you can download from http://unity3d.com/unity/download/. The projects were created using Unity 2020.1.0f1, but the project should work with minimal changes in future versions of the engine. If you would like to download the exact version used in this book, and there is a new version out, you can visit Unity's download archive at https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive. You can also find the system requirements for Unity at https://docs.unity3d.com/2020.1/Documentation/Manual/system-requirements.html in the Unity Editor system requirements section. To deploy your project, you will need an Android or iOS device. 

For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that you are working on a Windows-powered computer when developing for Android and a Macintosh computer when developing for iOS. For this book, we will be using C# as our scripting language.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

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We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781838987336_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Rename the sphere to Player and set the Transform component's position to (0, 1, -4)."

A block of code is set as follows:

/// <summary>
/// Update is called once per frame
/// </summary>
void Update ()
{
   // Check if target is a valid object
   if (target != null)
   {
      // Set our position to an offset of our target
      transform.position = target.position + offset;

      // Change the rotation to face target
      transform.LookAt(target);
   }
}  

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    [Tooltip("How fast the ball moves forwards automatically")] 
    [Range(0, 10)] 
    public float rollSpeed = 5; 

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

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