Unity Game Development Cookbook

Chapter 2. Scripting

To create your game’s behavior, you’ll need to write code. Code in Unity is written in C# (pronounced “C sharp”), a language developed by Microsoft that has an excellent open source implementation, which Unity makes extensive use of.

Warning

We strongly recommend that you read Chapter 1 before you work through any of the recipes in this chapter!

This book isn’t going to try to give you a complete guide to programming, or a complete guide to programming in C#—that’d be a whole other book. Instead, we’ll show you how to write scripts for use in Unity, using C# as the language.

Note

If you’re interested in learning C# in a broader sense, we recommend C# 7.0 in a Nutshell (O’Reilly), by Ben and Joseph Albahari.

2.1 Working with MonoBehaviours

Problem

You want to add scripts to your game objects, so that you can customize their behavior through code.

Solution

Unity game objects are containers for components. A MonoBehaviour—named for Mono, the scripting runtime that Unity uses—is a script component; when a MonoBehaviour is attached to a game object, it participates in the game’s update loop and gives you the opportunity to run code every frame.

To add code to a game object, you create a new MonoBehaviour script and attach it to the game object as a component. This means that you’ll need a game object to use:

1. Create a new cube by opening the GameObject menu and choosing 3D Object → Cube.

2. Use the Move tool to position the cube to somewhere in front of the ...