In the past few months I’ve been teaching myself how to use the Unity3D game engine, partly because I’ve always wanted to write a game and partly because I wanted to learn something very different from web development. I thought it would be useful to share the resource helped me. My focus has been on 2D games and iOS devices so the links reflect that.


Tutorials and tips

  • Unity best practices - An assortment of useful tips
  • Unity3D Student - A large number of free, short tutorial videos. Typically 5-10 minutes which is great for picking up things quickly
  • 2D in Unity - A short overview of working with 2D in Unity 
  • Created 2D games with Unity (part2, part 3, part 4, part 5, video) - A much more in depth tutorial with covers making a simple 2D game
  • Setting up version control - Essential if you’re doing a project of any size. It’s also worth setting your Asset Serialization mode to Force Text in Edit -> Project Settings -> Editor as binary files cannot be merged
  • Coding standards in Unity - I don't agree with all of these but it's a good overview
  • Unity3D wiki - It's worth digging around on this site. There's a wealth of information and useful links. In particular the scripts is packed full of useful code 

Useful plugins

  • iTween (free) - The de-facto tweening framework. It’s very simple to use and the documentation is great
  • 2D Toolkit (paid) - This plugin provides a lot of features to make creating 2D games in Unity much more straight forward. With the release of version 4.3 Unity comes native 2D tools. There is considerable crossover in functionality but, as you would expect, some of the native tools are Pro only so I’m sticking with 2D toolkit for the time being
  • NGUI (paid) - A popular framework for creating GUIs. In my experience it’s easy to create basic GUIs and has some great features, but it's not cheap

Testing

  • TestFlight - An incredibly useful way of distributing your app to multiple devices for testing. That’s all I’ve used it for and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do

iOS specific


General


  • Unity3D blog - It's worth keeping an eye as to find out about details of future work, new features and releases



Help