The Unity Game Engine has been shaking things up. The engine is only a little over five years old now and in 2010 they have earned Develop Magazine's Grand Prix Award and surpassed 170,000 developers. The user base of consuming Unity products has grown dynamically as well. There are over 30 million total Unity Web Player installations, and the base continues to expand at over 2 million installs per month.

Part of this success undoubtedly comes from their 2009 bold move to give away a free version of Unity Indie. Suddenly, everyone could get their hands on a game engine and anyone with the will to learn could start making games. Unity further empowered the masses by making Unity a viable development platform for iDevices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Mac, PC, Xbox 360, Wii, and now Android and PlayStation 3. Web deployment further democratized the 3D development and distribution process. At conferences and online Unity is generating quite the buzz. Since I have been using the software, conversations among faculty at training institutions and game developers alike have gone from, “Unity? No, I've never heard of that. Is it new?” to “Yeah, we're using Unity in three of our courses coming up this semester,” and Skype tags that say, “I want Unity 3.0.”

But with all this buzz, and the rapid development and deployment cycle that the Unity 3D team has undergone, there has been a distinct lack of introductory documentation, especially documentation aimed at the entire process of game development. In recent months there have been some new (and really nice) books released to get people into Unity and it is true that Unity provides some nice downloadable projects and some tutorials attached to those projects (which you should grab for free if you haven't yet), but often while my students (who are trained as 3D artists) have worked through these, although they have become familiar with Unity's interface and with what does what, they are simply unable to extrapolate this knowledge into a new “authored from scratch” game. Further, most of the Unity 3D provided tutorials are focused on Unity and provide prebuilt assets that the reader simply plugs into his or her Unity project. This misses some of the vital creative processes and tricks of getting these assets into Unity.

And so the impetus for this book emerged: create artist-driven, holistic training modules that provide the theory of game development and the methodology behind Unity that empower readers to create their own games.