Book Review: Unity 4 Game Development HOTSHOT
I recently received a review copy of another game development book from Packt Publishing: Unity 4 Game Development HOTSHOT by Jate Wittayabundit. The book turned out much different than I expected. Based on its excerpt and table of contents, I was hoping it would focus more on the game design and development concepts and general approaches. It is written in a much more hands-on approach, instead. That's not necessarily worse, it just targets a different audience.
Taking that into account, the book still has its flaws. The manner it is written in, makes it almost necessary to actually repeat the steps from the book in Unity, while reading it. The book can be really difficult to follow otherwise. This works very well with the sections which are oriented more towards configuring the Unity project in its UI. The code oriented parts didn't leave that good an impression on me - it's still too much code that needs to be typed into Unity or copied from the completed project. Having all the code printed in the book both in C# and JavaScript, makes the matters even worse.
Even after doing the projects from the book yourself, you'll be often on your own to generalize the knowledge from it. The book doesn't offer all the much accompanying explanations which would give a broader picture of the concepts that were used. Each section is followed by a brief description of what has been done and there are a couple of appendices at the end which can be used as reference material. For the rest, the reader will have to follow many links to the official documentation or find a different source. It also bothers me that I've encountered a couple of technical inaccuracies in the book.
Having said all that, I can still recommend it, if you already know your way around Unity and would like to learn a couple of very specific more advanced techniques. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to take advantage of the learned experience in your own projects. On the other hand; if you're expecting to gain some general knowledge about 2D and 3D animation, AI and shaders, as I did, you'll most likely be disappointed in the end.
If you still find this book of interest to you, you can buy it from Amazon or directly from the publisher.
