Creating Your Game World

Cameras are important in Unity. The camera displays what the player of your game sees. Lights in Unity do exactly what they do in real life. You can move lights around to see objects better.

• Make sure that the Transform of the Main Camera is set to have Position (0, 0, -15), and that the Transform of the Directional Light is set to have Position (0, 0, -15).

• Create a 3D Object Quad,rename it Background, and set its Transform Position to (0, 0, 1). Make sure its Rotation is (0, 0, 0).

• Drag the “SpaceNebula” image from the Materials folder in the Project Viewer and drop it on the Background object in the Hierarchy.

• Adjust the Transform Scale X and Y values of your Background until it covers the entire game display. (Make sure it’s set to the Standalone Aspect Ratio)

Awesome, you have a background! Now lets add something to control!

• From the Prefabs folder, drag and drop the Player object (the spaceship!) onto your scene view. Set its Transform Position to (0, 0, 0).

Did you notice that the spaceship has a shadow? It doesn’t look very good, so you can get rid of it. To select which objects the Directional Light applies to, you use the Culling Mask and Layers properties of the light.

• Select Directional Light and in its Inspector, click on the Layers drop-down menu in the top right.

• Select Add Layer…. In the first open layer, type Background.

• Go back to the Directional Light Inspector. Click on the Culling Mask drop-down menu and select Everything. Now deselect the Background in the Culling Mask. The Culling Mask will now say Mixed….

• Go to your Background object’s Inspector, select the Layers drop-down menu, and set it to the Background layer you just created. Now there will be no more shadow!

To control the game with scripts without attaching them to a 3D object, you can use Empty Objects.

• Create an Empty Object (GameObject > CreateEmpty). Name this Asteroids.

• Create another Empty Object called Lasers.

Your scene should look something like this when it is done. (You can use the icons in the top right-hand corner of the scene to look at it from different angles!)