ABSTRACT
The contemporary video games industry is experienced by most gamers and developers as a busy and bustling place, a hub of creative and technical activity where little or nothing remains the same for long. Here, the only constant and assured factor among the confusion is a constant state of change: changes in hardware, gamers, development studios, ideas, platforms and fads and fashions. Two recent changes, however, stand apart from most of the others, due mainly to their unprecedented nature. The first is a new and rapid surge in the number of game development start-ups; that is, newly created companies founded often by recent graduates or by breakaway industry veterans all hoping to release blockbuster games. It seems that now, more than ever before, more people are able to realise their dreams of creating video games that can reach sizeable and profitable markets. The second change is akin to a ‘paradigmatic shift’ in the kinds of technologies and hardware on which games are now made available to the public. Games can now be found on a greater selection of devices than ever before: from traditional home PCs and consoles to mobile phones, tablet computers, cable TV packages – even embedded in web pages. Both of these changes are taking place against the background of an industry generally moving towards the ‘democratisation of game development.’ This is a popular trend aiming to make the activity of game development as accessible to as many people as possible, in as many markets as possible. This is not without some risk, of course: the 2consequence of democratising game development is that more people can become game developers, targeting many platforms. More developers mean more games, and more games mean more choice for the consumer. But the game-loving consumer, though faced with ever-increasing choice, still has the limitations of a finite wallet and finite resources. A consumer must therefore make purchasing decisions between games, choosing to acquire one game rather than another because they cannot afford them all. The developers, then, create their products in a climate of competition, each struggling against the others to gain the attention and enjoyment of the gamers. To succeed in this furious and perhaps unfortunate competition, developers are forever striving to find ways to make their work simpler so they can concentrate less on technicalities, regulations and platform-specifics and more on the content and gameplay of their games. One of the tools that many developers are choosing to use for creating games, and perhaps the fastest growing tool today, is the Unity engine. This engine forms the subject matter of this book.
