Chapter 3. Creating a Space Shooter

This chapter enters new territory now as we begin development work on our second game, which is a twin-stick space shooter. The twin-stick genre simply 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#, as we'll see. The primary purpose of this is to demonstrate by example just how much can be achieved with Unity procedurally (that is, via script), even without using the editor and level-building tools. We'll still use these tools to some extent but not as much here, and that's a deliberate and not an accidental move. Consequently, this chapter assumes that you have not only completed the game project created in the previous two chapters, but also have a good, basic knowledge of C# scripting generally, though not necessarily in Unity. So, let's roll up our sleeves, if we have any, and get stuck in making a twin-stick shooter. This chapter covers the following important topics as well as others: