Unity for Beginners - Animal Crossing
Welcome to a course on game development for beginners! This course is for those who are looking for an updated,comprehensive and foundational course on the Unity game engine.
01Remote
You can take the course from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a computer and an internet connection.
02Self-Paced
Learn at your own pace, whenever it's convenient for you. With no rigid schedule to worry about, you can take the course on your own terms.
03Community
Join a vibrant community of other students who are also learning with Unity for Beginners - Animal Crossing. Ask questions, get feedback and collaborate with others to take your skills to the next level.
04Structured
Learn in a cohesive fashion that's easy to follow. With a clear progression from basic principles to advanced techniques, you'll grow stronger and more skilled with each module.
Getting started with the Unity game engine
Basics of the Unity editor
Building your first game world
Basics of the C# programming language
Third person controller and physics
Third person camera controller
Navigation in Unity
Non player character (NPC) patrolling
Welcome to a course on game development for beginners! This course assumes no prior knowledge of game development. We will be learning the basics of Unity, which is a popular game engine used to make games. We will be building a social simulation game in Unity3D similar to Animal Crossing starting right from the basics. By the end of this course you will have a good grasp on the Unity editor and you will develop basic game mechanics such as third person character and camera movement and creating a navigation system for agents to patrol in your game.
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Course Syllabus and Content
Introduction
7 Lessons
Let's get started with the basics of what a game engine is and the different categories of games.
Learn about the characteristics of 2D and 3D games
A brief introduction to the different game genres and what differentiates them.
An introduction to the different moving parts of game development such as design, development, music, testing and release
Set up Unity hub on your computer and download Unity engine
Let's make a new Unity3D project and get started with making our game
Let's download a code editor called Visual Studio Code to write our code in.
Unity editor basics
10 Lessons
Navigate and get acquainted with the different parts the Unity editor such as the project, inspector, hierarchy windows. We will also go over the different types of views (scene and game) and, learn how to customize the Unity editor.
Navigate and get acquainted with the different parts the Unity editor such as the project, inspector, hierarchy windows. We will also go over the different types of views (scene and game) and, learn how to customize the Unity editor.
In this section we'll go over what the different buttons of the toolbar can do.
The project window will display all the assets used in your project, for example any music, images, 3D models and anything else related to your project.
The hierarchy window lists every game object in the current scene. We will navigate the hierarchy window, and learn about parenting, a concept which demonstrates the parent-child relationship between objects.
We will spend a lot of time in the inspector window which shows all the knobs and dials for our objects.
A unity package is a collection of files and components that is wrapped up into a single file. Unity packages have a
.unitypackageextension.An overview of the different types of views offered by the Unity editor and the camera object.
Test your game as a user would play it with the play, pause and stop buttons.
Learn how to cuztomize the placement of different windows in the Unity editor.
Building the map
7 Lessons
In this module we will start building the game world for our game. We will go over importing assers, organizing our project and inspecting objects. We will also learn about concepts such as textures, materials and prefabs.
Let's import all the assets that we need into our game and go over what we imported.
Discover what is meant by the term assets and organize the assets in your game.
GameObjects are the building blocks of a game scene whereas, a component defines a GameObject and its functionalities.
Design aspects such as textures, materials and models are often neglected in game dev courses as these topics have more to do with design than development or game mechanics, but they can be specialized topics of their own. In this module we will give a brief explanation of models, materials and textures.
You'll often hear the term prefab during game development, so let's go over what this means. Prefab is short for pre-fabricated. Prefabs are pre-configured game objects that you can store and use in your game.
In this short and simple section we will go over how to inspect GameObjects
Building the game terrain
8 Lessons
In this module we will be building our game world! It will be a fully hands-on module and by the end you will have a general sense of the game surroundings in which your character will interact with other characters and live their life - the environment in which they'll grow flowers, eat snacks, wander around and nap.
In order to build the terrain of our game world we will use Unity's Terrain Toolbox. Terrain refers to the landscape of our game - be it desert, valley or forest.
We will create a cartoon grass landscape for our game along wityh some rolling hills using Unity's terrain tools.
Let's create a pathway for our character to walk on.
We're going to create a small pond. There are free and paid-for water assets available with which you can build simple or complex bodies of water, but for now we will just make a very simple pond.
In this lesson we will add objects such as a garden, house and foresat to our game world. I've tried to keep things simple here so we'll only include objects which we will need later on, like a watering can.
Light in Unity is a game component which is responsible for illuminating objects. We will go over the different types of lights we can use in our game such as: spotlight, directional light, point and area light.
Learn how to add more objects to your game world by importing assets from the Unity store.
C# basics
12 Lessons
In this module we will be covering the basics of scripting in Unity with C#. If you haven't done any programming before, don't worry - we will cover the core concepts. Additionally, whenever we write a C# script for our game, I will explain the lines of code.
A variable is a reference to some value in memory. Think of it as a container for holding a value. Before a value can be stored, its type must be specified (by default C# is a strongly typed language).
We will discuss the data types that will be used in our scripts. First let's understand what we mean by data types. A data type can be defined literally as a type of value or values. For example, your age is an integer, and your first name is a type of data composed of a sequence of characters.
Operators are used to carry out operations on operands. Operands are values or variables on which an operation is carried out.
Comments help to document your code and inform the intent of your code.
Arrays are a collection of values of the same data type. They are extremely useful data structures and help us write more complex code.
Imagine if your code could do different things based on different conditions. Well, it can! Using conditional statements we can control the flow of our programs.
You can execute a statement or block of code multiple times using loops. This is called iteration.
A function groups together code statements to perform a specific task. Whenever a function is called, all the code statements inside that function will execute.
C# is an Object-Oriented Programming language in which the programmer can develop software in modules. This is accomplished through treating data as objects. A class is like a blueprint or template of a specific object in which its properties, fields, events and methods are specified.
Understanding vectors is useful before we start making games. A vector is basically a quantity which has a direction. Vectors are useful and are used a lot in Unity. They're used to store the x, y and z values of components such as transform, rotation and scale. We cannot store these values together in a general variable. We need to use vectors for that.
The transform component is attached to every object in Unity. The transform components hold the x, y and z values for the position, rotation and scale properties of an object in respect to the game world co-ordinate system, or the parent object of child components.
Third person movement
6 Lessons
In this module we'll be learning about a few fundamental concepts such as Rigidbody and colliders, which will assist us in making our character move. We'll also learn how to add animations to our character.
You might hear the word "physics" thrown around a lot in game development, so let's go over what physics means in Unity. In the real world, objects are affected by gravity, friction, collisions, weight etc. Likewise in a game, objects are also affected by the forces of physics.
Colliders are invisible shapes on 3D objects that handle collisions. A collider can be added to a GameObject as a component, just like the Rigidbody component.
We will be using Rigidbody-based movement for our character to make it move left, right, forward and backward. There are two general ways to implement movement of a character in combination with Unity's physics engine.
Let's take a look at the components and properties of the camera object in the inspector window.
Let's write a script for your camera which will follow our main character as it walks. The camera will also be able to zoom in and zoom out.
NPC patrol
8 Lessons
In this module, we will be creating a system for a NPC (non-player character) to work around the game world intelligently using Unity's navigation system.
Using Unity's built-in navigation system you can create NPCs (non -player characters) that will move around your game world intelligently. That is to say that the navigation system gives characters the ability to navigate your gameworld and avoid obstacles.
In this lesson we will learn how to create a NavMesh
Let's add an idle animation to our Mousey charactert to make it look more animated!
In this script the Mousey NPC will patrol with animations along a certain pre-determined patrol path. The Mousey NPC will stop walking if the player crosses its path.
PatrolPathScript script allows for the visualization of the patrol path by drawing the lines and the spheres. It also has two functions that allows the AI script to grab the current and next point in the patrol.
A short lesson on setting up the Mousey character in the inspector window.
Great! Now we have our Mousey NPC that strolls back and forth as long as the main character is outside the defined circle.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this course for?
This course is for anybody who wants to learn game development with Unity from scratch. You don't need to have any previous background in either game development of C# programming to to start!
What if I need help?
You can ask us questions anytime through the community Discord channel or by sending us a message.