Chapter 3: Creating a Space Shooter

This chapter enters new territory as we begin development on our second game, a twin-stick space shooter. The twin-stick genre refers to any game in which the player input for motion spans two dimensions or axes, typically one axis for movement and one for rotation. Example twin-stick games include Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Geometry Wars. Our game will rely heavily on coding in C# to demonstrate just how much can be achieved with Unity procedurally (that is, via script), without using the editor and level-building tools. We'll still use the editor tools to some extent but won't rely on it as heavily as we did in the previous chapters.

Try to see the game created here and its related work in abstract terms, that is, as general tools and concepts with multiple applications. For your own projects, you may not want to make a twin-stick shooter, and that's fine. However, it's essential to see the ideas and tools used here as transferrable, as the kind of things you can creatively use for your games.

In this chapter, we'll learn how to create reusable components that will reduce the amount of work you need to do in the future. By configuring the camera, you'll also learn the differences between a 2D and 3D camera. And we will also learn how to generate objects at runtime, which will enable you to spawn any object you want in your own projects.

This chapter covers the following important topics:

• Creating reusable components
• Player controllers and shooting mechanics
• Basic enemy movement and AI
• Configuring a 2D camera
• Selecting and customizing particle systems
• Spawning enemies during gameplay

Now let's roll up our sleeves, if we have any, and get stuck into making a twin-stick shooter.