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Running an iOS version of Angry Bots turned out to be amazingly easy. It was just a matter of switching the build target to iOS, then immediately playing the game in the Editor using the Unity Remote app as the input device, or, to run the game in the iOS Simulator, performing a build with the Target SDK set to Simulator SDK in the Player Settings.

Now that you know how to construct a static 3D scene by placing GameObjects, it’s time to make the scene dynamic, and more interesting, by adding movement to GameObjects while the game is played. After all, a 3D graphics scene is nice, but an animated 3D graphics scene is even better!

At last, you’re ready to begin the main Unity project for this book, a bowling game in the style of HyperBowl, an arcade/attraction game I worked on more than ten years ago and ported to Unity just a few years ago. HyperBowl has a unique be-the-ball gameplay where the player constantly rolls the ball around a 3D environment to reach the pins. The bowling game constructed in this book will be much simpler but feature the same style of control.

Over the past several chapters, you’ve put together a fairly complete bowling game with 3D graphics, physics, sound, player controls, and automatic camera movement.

Although your bowling game is up and running on iOS, it’s not quite in a playable state because you don’t have any working player controls. That brings me to the issue of input handling, which is perhaps the most obvious difference between desktop and mobile games.

The default built target is listed on the title bar of the Editor window as PC, Mac and Linux Standalone.

Now that your Climber break is over and the basics of building and running a Unity iOS project have been covered, it’s time to resume your work on the bowling game and get it working on iOS!.

You’ve now completed this introduction to Unity and Unity iOS development, including downloading and installing Unity, developing a simple bowling game in the Unity Editor, getting it to run on iOS, and finally optimizing it to run with decent performance. Since not every Unity feature or game development topic was covered (this book would start to resemble a multivolume encyclopedia set!), I’ll wrap up with a chapter’s worth of “Explore Further.”

Of the three ways to move GameObjects in Unity, scripted control of the Transform Component was covered in the previous chapter, and physics will play a significant role in the bowling game example initiated in the next chapter. Scripted movement is ubiquitous. For example, even in the upcoming bowling game, which relies heavily on physics to control and simulate the bowling ball and its collision with the floor and bowling pins, the Camera following behavior is implemented by a script that modifies its Transform Component (much like the MouseOrbit script used in the cube scene). Not only that, every moving GameObject is reset between rolls and frames by restoring the values in its Transform Component.

Playing Trash Cat was fun, but this book is about making games in Unity, not playing games in Unity! Finally, it's time to get started in game development. It's a long journey starting from nothing and ending up with a playable game, and this is the beginning. In this chapter, you'll start with an empty scene in the Unity Editor and populate it with the basic building blocks of a 3D environment: models, textures, lights, a sky, and a camera.

Frankly, in these freemium days, it’s not easy to get a lot of people to pay for an app. So an alternative is to incorporate ads. iAd is not the only mobile ad product available, but it is the official ad service for iOS, paying developers 70% of revenue, the same as the revenue share for paid app sales. And, conveniently, Unity has scripting support for iAd. In this chapter we'll incorporate the two ad types offered by iAd—banner ads and interstitial (full-screen) ads—into our bowling game.

At this point, you have the glimmerings of a bowling game, or at least a scene in the Unity Editor where the player can roll the ball around on the floor. But the game won’t look like a bowling game until it at least has bowling pins. That will be remedied in this chapter and involve more Unity physics, including collisions between Rigidbody components (among the ball and pins) and compound colliders (to accommodate the shape of a bowling pin). On top of that, you’ll add collision-based sound effects so the game will sound like a bowling game.

Now that we have a playable iOS game, it's time to add some bells and whistles. We'll start with one of the hot trends, social gaming, which, at the minimum, involves collecting high scores onto a global leaderboard and rewarding players with achievements.

Now that you have Unity installed, it's time to get acquainted with the Unity Editor. The Editor (I’ll use the terms Unity, Unity Editor, and Editor interchangeably, as long as the meaning is clear) is where you create, test, and build a game for one or more target platforms. The Editor operates on a single Unity project containing assets included in a game.

Our bowling game that has been taking shape over the past few chapters is starting to actually look like a bowling game! It has a bowling ball, bowling pins (or rather, the barrels added in the previous chapter), game controls, and game physics. But it's still more a toy than a game, since it lacks game rules and scoring. That will be remedied in this chapter with a healthy dose of scripting. Most of that will take place in the game controller script, FuguBowlPlayer.js, which will be filled out with the complete logic for a bowling game laid out as states in a finite state machine (FSM). Just the scoring rules are complicated enough, so those will be encapsulated in a script named FuguBowlPlayer.js.