Fr

In the era of the indie game development scene, game

development tools are no longer luxury items potentially
costing up to millions of dollars, but are now affordable
for smaller teams or even individual developers. Among
these cutting-edge applications, Blender and Unity stand
out from the crowd as a powerful combination that allows
small-to-no-budget indie developers and hobbyists alike to
develop games that they have always dreamt of creating.
Right from the beginning, this book will cover
designing the game concept, constructing the gameplay,
creating the characters and environment, implementing
game logic and basic artificial intelligence, and finally
deploying the game for others to play. By sequentially
working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly
master the skills required to develop your dream game
from scratch.

Who this book is written for

This book is a handy resource for anyone who wants to
learn how to develop their own games using Blender and
Unity, both of which are freely available yet very popular
and powerful tools. Not only will you be able to master the
tools, but you will also learn the entire process of creating
a game from the ground up.

What you will learn from this book

Design and create a game concept that will
determine how your game will look and how
it will be played
Construct 3D models of your game
characters and create animations for
them, before importing them into the game
Build the game environment from scratch
by constructing the terrain and props, and
eventually put it all together to form a scene
Import and integrate game assets created
in Blender into Unity, for example, setting
up textures, materials, animation states,
and prefabs

Make the game characters move around

and perform certain actions, either through
player input or by being fully controlled by
artificial intelligence

Create particles and visual effects to

enhance the overall visual aesthetic
Deploy the game to various types of platform

D i s t i l l e d

Learn how to build a complete 3D game using the

industry-leading Unity game development engine and
Blender, the graphics software that gives life to your ideas

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

E x p e r i e n c e

Building a Game with

Unity and Blender
Lee Zhi Eng

P U B L I S H I N G

Sa
m

pl

C o m m u n i t y

Develop game structures, including a game

flow, user interface diagram, game logic,
and a state machine

$ 44.99 US
28.99 UK

community experience distilled

Building a Game with Unity and Blender

Building a Game with

Unity and Blender

ee

Lee Zhi Eng

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Creating Your Game Concept'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Building a Game with Unity and Blender

About the Author

Lee Zhi Eng is a 3D artist-turned-programmer who is currently the cofounder-

cum-chief technical executive at Reonyx Tech, a technology firm based in Malaysia.

Before he cofounded the company, he worked as an artist and programmer in several
game studios before becoming a part-time lecturer for 2 years at a university to teach
game development subjects related to Unity Engine and Unreal Engine. He has not
only took part in various projects related to games, interactive apps, and virtual
reality, but also participated in multiple projects that are more oriented toward
software and system development, such as vehicle tracking systems, corporate
management systems, web applications, and so on and so forth.
When he is not writing code, he enjoys traveling, photography, and exploring new
technologies. You can find more information about him at www.zhieng.com.

Preface
In the wake of the indie game development scene, game development tools are
no longer luxury items costing up to millions of dollars but are now affordable
by smaller teams or even individual developers. Among these cutting-edge
applications, Blender and Unity stand out from the crowd as a powerful combination
that allows small to no budget indie developers or hobbyists alike to develop games
that they have always dreamt of creating.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Your Game Concept, will teach you how to design your own game,
such as writing the game's story, choosing a visual style, and designing characters
and environment concepts.
Chapter 2, Creating Characters, will be a step-by-step tutorial on how to create your
game character in 3D using Blender.
Chapter 3, Animating Your Characters, will help you learn how to bring your game
characters to life by creating different animations for the characters in Blender.
Chapter 4, Creating the Environment, will help you learn how to construct an
astonishing 3D environment for your game in Blender.
Chapter 5, Integrating Your Assets into the Game, is a step-by-step tutorial on how
to import your 3D assets from Blender to Unity and set up prefabs for later use.
Chapter 6, Developing the Game Structure, will help you learn how to create the
user interface and start writing C# scripts to create player movements and
artificial intelligence.

Preface

Chapter 7, Creating Levels and Game Progression, will help you learn how to create
in-game power-ups to boost your player's ability and create save points to save
your game progression.
Chapter 8, Post-Production and Visual FX, will show you how to enhance your game's
visual quality by learning how to apply camera effects to your game and create
numerous types of particle effects.
Chapter 9, Deploying the Game, will help you learn how to deploy your game for
multiple types of platform with Unity.

Creating Your Game Concept

In this chapter, you will learn about the process of creating your game concept. It's
usually called the preproduction stage where designers will plan out all of the game
details ahead of time, that is, before entering the production stage where developers,
such as programmers and artists, will start doing their works based on the game
concept provided to them.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Job roles in game development

The gameplay design

Writing the game's story

Choosing a visual style

The characters' concept

The environment concept

Job roles in game development

Before we dive into the process of creating a game, let's take an overview on some
of the roles in game development. We are looking at the general level, where each
of these roles can be further split down into more specialized roles:

Game designer: A game designer is a mastermind who designs the core

elements and gameplay mechanics of a game. They not only need to
understand how to design an interesting and fun game, but they also must
have the creative and technical capabilities to communicate with the artists
and programmers in order to make sure that both the artistic and technical
processes comply with the game design.

[1]

Creating Your Game Concept

Scriptwriter: A scriptwriter is someone who helps to construct compelling

scenarios and dialogues for in-game cinematics based on the storyline and
direction set by the game designer. A good scriptwriter knows how to make
the players emerge into the game world through storytelling techniques and
esthetic wordings.

Programmer: A programmer is a technical person who implements game

features that run and control the game, as well as develop tools for the
team to speed up the development process. They know every single bit of
what's happening behind the game and occasionally turns coffee into code,
too. Some of the specialized roles of a game programmer are a gameplay
programmer, a toolkit programmer, a network programmer, a graphics
programmer, and so on.

Artist/Animator: A game artist is a creative person who designs and

creates art assets for a game, such as concept arts, 3D models, textures,
sprite sheets, particle effects, and so on. A game animator specializes in
creating animations for the game characters as well as producing the
in-game cinematics.

Audio engineer: An audio engineer is an expert in creating the soundtrack

for a game, including music, sound effects, character voices, and ambient
effects. The audio engineer must be able to get the feel of the atmosphere of
the game and create a suitable soundtrack accordingly.

Tester: A game tester helps to playtest the game during the development
phase to ensure that it's free of a programming bug and complies with
the requirements set by the publisher. They will also make sure that the
gameplay meets the expectation of the game designer and that it's fun to
play with.

There are many other job roles that we have not covered here, such as an AI
designer, a level editor, a lighting artist, and so on. Specialized roles like these are
normally only available in big studios, which have the resources to ensure that every
aspect of the game they are creating is at its highest standard.
For a smaller game development team, an individual team member can handle
multiple roles, and more than one person can share some roles in order to split the
workloads.

Gameplay design
The process of gameplay design can be divided into five major stages.

[2]

Chapter 1

Starting point
Different people have different approaches in designing a game. Some designers like
to start with the characters' design or storyline, and only after that, they will decide
what type of gameplay is suitable for it. On the other hand, some designers like to
start with the gameplay instead. There is no absolute rule on how to start designing a
game; it's entirely dependent on what inspires you in the first place: Did a good story
suddenly pop up in your mind? Were you inspired by a game you loved to play
during childhood? Or were you inspired through silly conversations with your best
friends? Write down your initial ideas; who knows, it could become the next popular
game one day.
For me, I like to start by choosing the game genre and designing the gameplay right
before anything else. I find that it's quite important to design a gameplay early on
so that it can be tested repeatedly and to check whether the gameplay is fun or not.
Otherwise, all the time we spent on writing a good storyline might be wasted if only
to find out the gameplay simply doesn't work the way we had imagined. You can try
to experiment on different approaches and see which method suits you more.
One mistake made by most of the newbie game developers is neglecting the
importance of a game design document (GDD). A GDD is usually a collaborative
effort within a development team to organize ideas and help convey the designer's
vision to the rest of the team. It also helps to make sure that everyone is working
together at the same page, avoiding assumptions, and conflicting workflows.
Besides this, GDD is also very helpful for solo developers. It allows you to see the
bigger picture of your game and easily spot any major flaws in the game design.
Other than this, you can also look at the list of every aspect of the game and decide
what needs to get done based on its priority.
Most of the time, a common office suite, such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or
LibreOffice, is sufficient for creating the GDD. If you're in a team, however, it's
best to use an editor that has the capability of real-time collaboration between
team members. I personally find Google Documents very useful for this purpose,
especially during brainstorming sessions where every team member can contribute
their ideas and let others to see them during discussion. Try to pick the most suited
tool for you and your team.

Choosing a game genre

Picking a game genre early on is also very important. It gives you a sense of
direction, and it lays down the foundation for you to further improve and innovate.
There are many different types of game genres, such as first person shooter, roleplaying, real-time strategy, adventure, action, and puzzle.
[3]

Creating Your Game Concept

Alternatively, you may also invent your own genre if you are the type of person who
likes to try out new ideas and always think out of the box. Although this may sound
overly ambitious, but this is actually doable, as game genres are being invented all the
time. However, following this path requires a ton of prototyping to prove that your
idea is workable and fun as you're trying to create something that no one has even
seen before.
If you have no idea which genre to pick at the moment, you might want to look at
the statistics of the best-selling video game genres, and hopefully it will give you
some inspiration:

It's important to decide on the genre early before you start working on the game. Basically,
switching game genres during development means starting all over again from scratch.

Game mechanics
Gameplay is something that connects players' actions with the purpose of the game
and its main challenges. Gameplay will define what the player can or cannot do in
the game, as well as conditions that allow the player to progress through the game.
Gameplay design involves a wide range of designing aspects, such as a level design,
gameplay balancing, player behavior prediction, and choices planning. All of this
can be incorporated into something called game mechanics.

[4]

Chapter 1

Game mechanics are constructs of rules that make up the gameplay of a game.
It determines what actions the player can take, how the actions interact with the
game states, and how other game entities respond to the player's actions. Gameplay
defines what a game is to the player, whereas game mechanics are the parts that
define the gameplay itself. In other words, gameplay is nothing more than a set
of game mechanics. Oftentimes, gamers are popularizing famous games for its
game mechanics. For example, Gears of War was famous for its cover mechanic
when it first released in 2006. Prince of Persia blew peoples' minds away when first
showing two of its famous mechanicsthe parkour mechanic as well as the time
manipulation mechanic. Angry Birds would not have been downloaded by two
billion times across the globe if it didn't feature the slingshot mechanic!
We can split a set of game mechanics into two main categories: core mechanics and
sub-mechanics. Core mechanics are the most important mechanics in your game. You
cannot simply change your game's core mechanics because it will break the nature
and essence of your game. For example, take away the shooting mechanic from
Counter Strike, and the game would simply become something else, but something
other than Counter Strike. It will not make any sense at all to play Counter Strike
without a shooting mechanic. Sub-mechanics, however, can be taken away without
breaking the game. Again, we use Counter Strike as an example, but this time, we
will take away just the jumping mechanic. Now the players can no longer jump, but
that doesn't make Counter Strike a different game; it's still a first person shooter, you
can still make the headshots. It's important to determine what are the core mechanics
of your game early on, but not so important for sub-mechanics. You can add in submechanics later on during the production stage because, as previously mentioned,
it won't break the game. A strong and solid core mechanics will ensure the success
of your game, so focus on it first before anything else. After this, you can try to
experiment on different sub-mechanics to enhance the gaming experience.
In short, proper planning will ensure that the gameplay is balanced, unpredictable,
and makes sense to the player. Even an experienced game designer can hardly
design a perfect gameplay in one shot. It takes a ton of testing and iterations in order
to get the gameplay to feel right and fun to play with. The formula is simple: test,
test, and more tests!

[5]

Creating Your Game Concept

Level design
A level is the venue where a player interacts with the gameplay elements. It can also
be called as a map or stage. As a level designer, you're responsible for designing
the layout of the levels to comply with the purposes of your gameplay: Does this
level carry missions? Is this level for multiplayer purposes? Roughly how long do
you expect the user to play this level? You need to ask yourself all sorts of questions
before you start designing your level.
One important aspect of level design is flow control. Game level with good flow
control can direct a player toward the goal of the level and prevent idling or moments
of unintentional confusion from occurring in game. You need to be clear about the
intent and purpose of the particular level and then by using the elements within the
level, such as lighting, props, and items. You can subconsciously lead the player
toward the goal. You will learn more about this later when we design the environment.
Let's have a look at the sample level I designed for this book. Players must search
for the key in order to open the gate and fight the final boss. While exploring the
environment, player will occasionally encounter monsters and involve in intensive
battles. There are also some items aligned randomly across the path for the player to
pick up, restore health, and help progress the game. Here's an image showing a simple
level with simple gameplay in mind to demonstrate what a map layout looks like:

[6]

Chapter 1

Rapid prototyping
Rapid prototyping is a good way to quickly test out your game idea and see if it
works the way you want. Sometimes, a game idea might sound good only on paper,
but it just doesn't work out like how you'd imagine it to be. The last thing you want
is to only realize that you have been working on a bad idea in the middle of the
development phase. Rapid prototyping not only saves you from this situation, but
also allows you to think out of the box and freely experiment on all kinds of random
ideas. If the idea works, then it is great; if it doesn't work, just scrap it and try the
other ideas.
When you rapidly prototype your game, you should stop worrying about the
graphics and just focus on the gameplay mechanics alone. The character could be
just a cube, a sphere, or anything simple. The level could be just a plane or with more
cubes on it acting as obstacles. You also shouldn't worry about the storyline at this
stage because you might be scrapping the idea minutes later.
Unity Game Engine, the game development tool that we will be using in this book,
is built for rapid prototyping in mind. It's extremely easy to just throw in some
primitive shapes, applying some scripts to the shapes, and you are good to go. You
can instantly start playtesting your ideas without much effort spent on setting up
the game engine. In addition, you can download sample game assets from the Unity
Asset Store, including 3D models, animations, and even sample scripts to kick-start
your prototyping process.
Besides this, there are also plenty of plugins available at the Unity Asset Store,
which provide extra tools for you to rapidly construct a demo level or create game
mechanics without the need of writing any code. All-and-all, Unity Game Engine
makes rapid prototyping even more rapid with the features mentioned previously.
You will only be learning how to use Unity in later chapters.

Writing the game's story

Almost every video game has a storyline behind it. Even a game that has neither
cinematic features nor a single line of dialogue could still contain a background story
that defines the world of the game. Oftentimes, video game storyline is parallel to the
progression of the gameplay. The further away the player progresses, the more they
will learn about the storyline of the game.
You don't necessarily need to present your game's story through narratives or
cinematic features unless you're making a story-heavy game, such as Last of Us. For
a simple game, it's better to let the players discover the background story themselves
by playing through your game. This is much more rewarding than directly telling
them everything!
[7]

Creating Your Game Concept

Choosing a visual style

Before we start designing the characters and environment, we need to set a visual
guideline in order to ensure a consistent design throughout the game. When
you place the characters together with the environment, they should fit with the
background, and they should not have too distinctive art style and quality from each
other as if the characters and environment were taken from different games.
Generally, visual style can be split between two categories: realistic and stylized. It's
entirely up to you what type of style you want to pick for your game, whether it's
ultrarealistic, extremely stylized, or somewhere in between. It depends on the vision
you set for your game as well as your team's capability in delivering the art style.
Discuss with your teammate what type of visual style they are comfortable with and
make sure that you understand your team before you start, which will prevent a lot
of troubles from happening during production stage.

The characters concept

The characters concept usually refers to the concept arts, which display the design
of your game characters. Concept artists have to come out with dozens of sketches
and color thumbnails before a final design is selected by the art director. Once the
character concept is confirmed and finalized, 3D artists start working on the 3D
models by referring to the concept arts provided for them.
It's not as difficult as you think to design a character from scratch. Make sure that
you truly understand the game you're trying to make. If you don't, try to read
through the GDD and the storyline repeatedly until you are very familiar with each
character's background story, personality, and their roles in the game. Once you're
familiar with the game characters, try to imagine how they should look like in the
visual style you chose earlier.
[8]

Chapter 1

When designing characters, it's best to start with the silhouette. Try to define the
character's personality using only the silhouette and ignore all other forms of
details. We don't need to worry about the color, texture, facial expression, clothing,
accessory, and anything else at this stage. Focus only on the body shape, size,
contour, and posture that can easily make a player recognize the character and be
able to tell the roles of the characters by simply judging from its outlook.
I prepared an image showing three characters' silhouettes. Try to guess what their
personality is by judging from their respective silhouette.

Let's take a closer look at this diagram:

Character A: The first character looks small, cute, and vulnerable. He is

probably harmless to you, don't you think so?

Character B: The second character looks like an ordinary person, but his
uneasy posture infers that he could be a sly character with bad intention.
Better not to get too close to him.

Character C: The third character looks extremely dangerous even from afar!
Does he bite? I'm sure he does more than that!

Once you have chosen the silhouette of each character, you can now start adding
detail! However, no color should be used at this stage. Use only lines to sketch out
the appearance of the characters. Concept sketches should be fast, and it's okay for
the sketches to look messy at this stage because we want our brain to continuously
come out with different ideas without being distracted by small details. Don't be
afraid to experiment with different ideas you have, you might be surprised how
creative you could be!

[9]

Creating Your Game Concept

After you've done a dozen or so rough sketches, pick one that you think most
suitable for your game. Redraw the characters with fine lines and make sure that
they look clean this time because we are going to put some colors on it!
The following image shows the sample characters' concept that I used for this book.
I have chosen a more manga-ish, chibi style for my game characters. I skipped the
silhouette and rough-sketching steps because well, the game demo I'm showing in
this book is just a very, very simple game, so it's exceptional.

Now, let's take a closer look:

Character A: Block out the character with simple shapes, only simple shapes!

Character B: Start adding detail.

Character C: Clean-up and finishing.

After you have done all the clean-up jobs, we will proceed to the next stage, which
is adding colors to your characters! Use only plain colors to fill in the design at
this moment. No lighting or shadow should be allowed because again, we want to
focus on experimenting different sets of color pallets on our characters and not be
distracted by elements.
Be cautious when deciding the color palette for your characters. Choosing
the wrong color could influence your player's interpretation toward
your character's personality and role. Wrong color could also affect the
visual focus of your character, making it hard to be seen on the screen (for
example, a green character standing on a grass field).

Here, I experimented with three different colors on my character. I picked the one
that, in my opinion, resembles his personality:

[ 10 ]

Chapter 1

Character A: Although red color looks really nice on him, it looks way
too aggressive and that doesn't suit my faint-hearted character.

Character B: Blue color looks more calm and friendly, which is suitable
for my character.

Character C: Totally, not my cup of tea.

The same method is used for the monster design as well. Eventually, I picked the
one with red/pink patterns on its body. The color is more aggressive and at the same
time contradicts with the main character's color. Also, warm colors, such as red or
orange, often represent caution or danger. In order to speed up the process, I will
just pick monster C as the final boss.

[ 11 ]

Creating Your Game Concept

Finally, create a scale comparison chart to let everyone in your team know exactly
how big or small should the characters look like. This information is extremely
important for the 3D artists as well as gameplay designer. Make sure that everyone
in your team is aware of this chart.

The environment concept

The environment concept, as the name implies, is the concept design for your game's
environment. The difference between level design and environment design is that
the latter is more about the arthow to use artistic elements to make the scene look
more interesting. Many important guidelines will be given to the concept artists
before they start using the environment concept. Artists need to know the visual
style, color mood, detailed description of the environment, and most importantly,
the level layout.
Here is the environment concept I did for this book. I split the layout into several
parts and illustrated each of them based on the visual style and color mood I picked
earlier. Note how I use lighting to guide player toward the correct path.

[ 12 ]

Chapter 1

Summary
In this chapter, you learned all the important aspects on how to design your own
game as follows:

Introduction to important elements that you need to include in your game

design, such as game genre, game mechanics, level design, storyline, and
visual style

Explaining what is rapid prototyping and how it helps establish a solid

game idea

The process of creating concepts for your game character and environment

In the next chapter, we will gain knowledge on how to turn our characters design
into 3D models using Blender.

[ 13 ]

Get more information Building a Game with Unity and Blender

Where to buy this book

You can buy Building a Game with Unity and Blender from the
Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

Stay Connected: