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From YouTube: Building games with Unity and Azure

Description

Unity is a game development platform that allows you to create high quality 3D/2D games, and deploy them across mobile, desktop, VR/AR, gaming consoles or even the Web.

In this episode we're joined by Cloud Developer Advocate, Brian Peek (@BrianPeek), who gives us some insight on building games with Unity. He shows how .NET developers can use their skills with Unity and also leverage cloud services in the backend.

01:30 - What is Unity?
04:31 - What's the process of going from project to native game?
07:46 - Does Unity support .NET standard libraries?
09:04 - (Demo) What is the development experience like?
15:22 - How do Visual Studio and the Unity editor work together?
16:52 - What are some additional services that game developers can use?
20:22 - What devices does Unity target?
21:25 - How does Unity compare to Xamarin?
22:23 - Where can we find helpful resources?

Useful Links
Unity Pro and Visual Studio Bundle: https://aka.ms/vsunitybundle
Unity gaming platform: https://unity3d.com/
PlayFab: https://playfab.com/
Serverless APIs with Azure Functions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-create-serverless-api?WT.mc_id=ondotnet-channel9-cephilli
Vysor: http://www.vysor.io/
Azure for Game Developers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sandbox/gamedev/?WT.mc_id=ondotnet-channel9-cephilli
Create a Free Account (Azure): https://aka.ms/azft-net

A

In this episode of on.net show,, we'll be talking to brian peek, about building games with the unity platform.

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save the date for .net conf 2018 on september 12th through 14th.

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.net conf is a free three-day, virtual developer.

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Event, co-organized by the .net community and microsoft.

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you'll enjoy a wide selection of live sessions that feature speakers from the community and the .net product teams.

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head over to www.dotnetconf.net to learn more and save the date.

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Welcome to another episode of the on.net show., my name is cecil phillip, and with me today I have my friend, brian peek., hello, brian., not much.. How are you? doing pretty good. so, before we start,.

A

Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what exactly do you do? Here?.

B

So, yeah,, I am a azure cloud developer advocate and I'm focused on the gaming side of the world.

B

So, video games that would use the cloud for things like compute,, multiplayer,, leaderboards,, anything and everything that you might find in a cloud gaming back end,. I want to help you with.

B

Got you. so, that means you're familiar with things.

A

Like unity and some of these other frameworks that are used, to.

B

Yeah, exactly. the front-ends, unity, unreal, monogame., I mean, there's tens, if not more hundreds, maybe at this point a game, developer frameworks and engines and whatnot.

B

so, yeah,. Part of this is how do you plug those.

B

Front-Ends into a cloud-based back end as well.

A

Cool. so,: let's talk about unity, a little bit.

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sure.. What exactly we could do with it?

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so,? Why don't we start with? What is unity exactly and what do we use it? For? so, unity is a game development, engine.

B

What's neat about unity is, it has an editor and it.

B

Has an engine that sits behind it.

B

so, if you're a more visual developer,, it's more of a drag and drop experience. so, you can actually create characters,.

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You can create sprites, and 3d assets and whatnot, drag those directly into the editor and then place them in your 3d world, or even your 2d world and then write code to move those around.

B

so,. It's a very component-based model,.

B

Which is a little bit different than running an event-based model like an enterprise application or would be a windows forms, that type of thing. sure., but it's cross-platform,, which is one of the major selling points. so,. If you write your game,, you can spit this out to name a platform and unity supports it from windows.

B

And xbox to their television sets that you.

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Can export your game to and install them and run them on your tv.

B

so,? It's a right once, deploy everywhere with caveats.

B

sure., but you can get your game to a variety of platforms. Pretty easily. got you. so,. I know from.

A

Building different types of applications,, there's, usually a developer side and then there's a designer side. sure. is unity more of a designer-focused application?.

A

It kind is,, it straddles the border.

B

Okay., you can do design of things directly in the editor.

B

I mean,. There are some simple tools for drawing like 3d object, primitives or spheres, and things like that., yeah. so,. If you had a very simple game,, you could build it entirely. Inside of unity.

B

got it.. Most games. Aren't that simple,. So you need a 3d package like blender, or 3d, studio, max, or even if you're doing 2d,. You need a paint program,.

B

You need photoshop or something to actually sit down and actually create your assets and sounds and whatnot.

A

Got you. so, one of the things that was always interesting to me about unity was. I was. I always heard that you can.

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Use .net and I could write games using c#.

B

A

Or my.net languages for that. is that true?.

A

It is mostly true.

B

Okay. so,, we say that unity runs on.net.

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however,. In reality, unity runs on mono.

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okay. up until just the 2017 edition.

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Of unity, which came out just maybe close to a year, now,.

B

You were always stuck in .net 3.5.

A

So, a lot of things like async and await,.

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You couldn't use inside your unity, code. okay.. You had to use their code routines, which is just kind of a construct that exists in c# and unity has built on top of in order to do asynchronous type things in a game.

B

With the newer versions of btd now,, you can use api that are compatible with.net 4.6,.

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And even with the 2018 editions of .net of unity,.

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You can also use code and api and sdks that are .net standard, 2.0.

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So, those things together,, you kind of get a more modern development experience..

B

As I said,. There are some caveats because you're running on top mono, you're not running on top of .net framework, proper.

A

Okay. so,, you mentioned that it was built on mono.

A

So, from the perspective of a developer using visual studio and the tooling,, what does that look like??

A

Does that mean that I have to build apps on linux and mac,, or can I use visual studio, or what's that tooling kind, of?.

B

It's interesting. so, inside of unity. You would build your game.

B

you're, going to drag and drop your sprites, you're, going to rate the behaviors for those sprites and how they interact,, collisions, and scoring,, and all that sort of stuff..

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But your code editor to write. Those scripts is visual. Studio.

A

B

You can do debugging inside of there,.

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You made a few set of breakpoint and attach to unity,.

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You can hit that breakpoint,. You can inspect variables,. You can debug your scripts all the way. Through.

B

A

Just like you would, in any other.

B

Visual studio type of application. sure., but when it comes to actually creating your final product,, so you want your game to run on android,. You want it to run on ios, unity doesn't necessarily export directly to your platform. there's oftentimes intermediate step.

B

so,. In the case of ios, for example,, you want to write an iphone or an ipad game.

B

in unity,. When you do your export, you'll get an xcode project.

B

okay.. All of that is actually it's called il to cpp,, and this is where one of those caveats comes: in.

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for ios and other platforms,.

B

You get a transpiled version of your game.

B

With a transpiles il,, the output of c#, essentially. yeah. to c++ code, and that c++ code is then run through the compiler, that's sitting on your mac, in this case, in order to build the ios version of the application.

B

yeah. so, because of this,.

B

There are a few caveats of things that you can do in .net that by the time you generate the c++ code and actually build your final project, won't work, things like reflection, because reflections handle that runtime.

B

yeah., but when you're transpiring that il and spitting it out to c++, the stuff that would happen at runtime,. You can't account for now because you can't account for every possible permutation of that.

B

so, things like reflection, won't necessarily export correctly on a multi-platform like ios, because it is actually running natively at this point.. It's not running on top of mono or .net,.

B

It's an actual native, build application for ios.

A

Sure., so it kind of sounds like, depending on whatever the target is,. You just have to be cognizant of what the limitations are when we're trying to publish applications to those particular platforms.

B

Exactly, and for most unity, games, like if you stay within the confines of a normal .net application,, there's not a lot of things that use reflection..

B

If you're writing your game, you're, probably not in your script, going to use reflection. yeah.. But if you downloaded an sdk,, you download a .net 4.6 sdk for something just off the internet.

B

That would work great in a .net 4.6 app if it uses the dynamic keyword,.

B

If it uses reflection or a couple of other things.

B

It'll look great, it'll work great in the editor.

B

it'll work great in the win32 standalone bill, because that runs on top of mono. yeah.. But by the time you get to an il to cpp platform,.

B

That's kind of unity's road map.

B

The concept of running and on top of mono in the final application on xbox, on windows, on every platform. yeah., is moving to this il to cpp standard.

B

so,. You need to make sure.

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You tests across all your platforms to make sure that you're not going to run into one of those roadblocks at the end.

A

Okay. sounds good. so,. We were talking a lot about.net's standard, and.net core.

B

In the community in general.

A

So,, what if I had a .net standard, sdk.

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Or library, or something like that, .net 2 per se,.

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Is that something that I can bring and use it in my unity, application? yeah. so,! If you have a.

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.Net center 2.0 or even a .net center 4.6 app,.

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In unity,, you can just drag and drop the dll into your project into the unity editor.

B

Unity doesn't have a concept of nuget,; it doesn't have a concept of a package manager per se.

B

okay.. It wants the actual dll that would come out of that nuget package. okay.. You would throw that in the plugins directory inside of unity, and again,. If it does crazy stuff, it might work in the editor,.

B

You can press "play" and see it working just great because it's sitting on top of the real model., but once you get it to another platform, through the il2cpp engine,, it may not work.

B

One of the places where I've hit this is some of our azure sdk for example,.

B

They were never intended or designed to be used on unity.

B

sure. so,. There have been a couple of places where newton software and library does some reflection. Things.

B

With the newer versions, and those look like they work, but then, when you get to your final op,, they don't., we have some hacks and things that can get around that, but it just something to be cognizant. Of.

A

Sure, that sounds pretty good, so,. I know you have some demos,. Why don't we take a look at the demo and see what this unity development experience looks? Like.

B

Sure, absolutely. so,. This is a demo that I wrote for build..

B

I'm going to put a link at the bottom of the video here, so you can see the full section that we did at build for it., but this is a game called scavenger, and the concept here is it's a virtual scavenger hunt.

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so, every day, you're, given a list of five items to go, find and you have to take pictures of them, and through carcun of services. We determine if you've actually taken a picture of that item, and you're awarded a point or not,. If you have.

B

so,, as you can see, the unity developer environment here is very graphical..

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This is the title screen here and you can see on the left. I have a canvas that has a background image,.

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It has, got to zoom in here, there we go.

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It has the start button and the leaderboard button, which you can see down, here,.

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And you drag and drop these items,.

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You create your scripts in visual studio,, you add them as behavior's to these items, and that's how you create the game. Essentially.

B

In terms of the sdk 's that I was talking, about,.

B

Down here, there's a plugins directory.. Then you can see we have the projectoxford.vision library, a newton software,. These are one of the ones that just happen to work in unity and work with the il2ccp output and everything is happy..

B

Nice. so,. There was no extra code that I needed to write in order to go: call the cognitive services sdk or the cognitive service that lives up in azure..

B

Inside of the scenes, folder here,, you can see there,. This is the title screen,.

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There is a leader board which I'll show in a second here,.

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The list of items, and then the actual camera.

B

so,. Let me actually start the game here and let me have a screen mirror app. Here.

A

That's really cool,. What app are you using to do? That?.

B

This is vysor, which, through.

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Usb debugging on an android device, you can mirror the screen to any laptop,, any windows, mac, or any vern's on linux, but definitely any windows or a mac. Machine.

B

yes. so, great for doing demos. So I don't have to have like a webcam pointed at the phone.

B

so,. If I run the scavenger app here,, you can see,. This uses a couple: different pieces.

B

so,. It's a unity game that uses.

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Azure cognitive services on the client and is also has a cloud back-end.

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so,. There are some azure functions or some cosmos db and something called playfab, which is a new service that microsoft has for, specifically, for game development, which allows you to do things like authentication,, leaderboards,, achievements,,.

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And a variety of other things that would just be geared towards game: developers., very easy,. It's free to use for and up to many many users., so definitely something cool to check out now..

B

I will have some links for that at the end as well. sure. so,, I click "start" here,. You can see it's going to ask,. Show me a list of items.

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That I would need to find for the day, slowly but surely.

A

So,, what this is doing now is, like you were talking about this cloud back-end to it.

B

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So, now it's calling into these various services,, the one that you have there,.

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They going to pull these data back.

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Exactly., this is not local,. This is not like sinking or anything like that, which suppose they're not.

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No, no. this is an azure bag. That's why I took a little bit because it had to spin the service up, because I haven't touched it in a while. so,. It just hit an azure function which pulled some data out of a cosmos db and is now displaying it here on the screen.

A

B

So,, you can take a picture of, we'll try a keyboard, here. so,. I get a picture of my camera, and if I take a picture of my keyboard,, it will now use cognitive services to upload that video or that image..

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You heard the ding and they say there's a check mark. It actually recognized that as being a keyboard,.

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And just to show that it's not completely fake..

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If I take a picture of a remote control and I take a picture of you, theoretically at the topsee, not a match,, please try again. what? so,. This is actually using cognitive. you're, not a remote control.

B

so, that worked exactly how it was supposed to.

B

So,, if I go back here to leaderboard,, you can see, here's the people that have played. got it.. It was at 40 before,. Now it's a 41.

B

Yeah. so,, all of that is tied together using unity, using.net,, using visual studio to edit all that code, using azure to run the back-end and playfab as well.

B

Sure. so,, it sounds like as you're developing.

A

A game there's a lot of different pieces that are here, right?.

B

For this game, yeah, there's definitely a lot of pieces.

A

So,, it sounds like you use unity to do a lot of that design work because likewise you were flipping through so that you had various styles and. yeah.

B

I guess,, I know that you call them scenes maybe.

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scenes exactly. so,, you had these different scenes and so now, again,.

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Through your unity, scripts you'll edit, whatever is happening, or motion,, or anything like that's, coming up in those scripts.

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I should jump over to visual studio here and I can pull up one of the scripts to show you.

B

Let's look quickly and what's a good one, to look at.

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Look at the camera behavior. so,: this is the screen that actually takes the picture.

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okay. so,. Everything in unity,. Almost everything from unity inherits from what's called a monobehavior.

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A monobehavior always gets you a start, which is.

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Your initialisation and an update, which is every frame what you want to do.

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then, inside of here. You grab some instances of various objects like the camera, button,.

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The spot where you want to drop the image in,.

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The audio for the ding that says you're right, or the buzzer that says you're wrong. essentially, inside of here, once you've grabbed those objects. This is very much done. It. I mean,. In order for me to grab the clip for sending it to cognitive services,.

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I grab the texture from the camera,. I encode it to a ping,. I put that in in memory, stream, create a vision, service, client object, which is the standard project, oxford client, sdk,,.

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Have my keys, pass in that memory stream, which contains the image,, and you can see I'm using await. so,? This is using again .net46asyncawait.

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In old versions of unity, you would have to do code routines and whatnot, and these things wouldn't be compatible.. This was simply me taking that sdk dragging and dropping it into unity, and it works.

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then,, pulling back the result of the tags and determining if that tag, matched what I expected it to be.

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got it. so,. We have a pre-determined list of tags for each object.

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so, like a keyboard,, you don't always get back keyboard from cognitive services. Based on what keyboard you taken a picture of,. Sometimes it comes back as computer., we'll take both of those things and close enough of a computer..

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If cognitive services recognizes that as a computer, we know that you've actually taken a picture of a keyboard. got you. so,. What I wanted to know, was,.

A

So you showed me a visual studio right now..

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How do I take the output of visual studio?.

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How do I take these assets that are here and put them into unity??

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It's automatic. so, inside of unity, here,.

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I have a scripts directory.

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right: here. can zoom in on end.

B

Yes, zoom in a little bit., so I have a scripts directory., so everything inside the unity lives inside of this assets, folder.

A

So I have some animations,.

B

I have fonts and pictures and icons, and what not and scripts is where all of your c# code lives.

B

so, for each one of these you, right, click.

B

I'm sorry., you right click and you create c# scripts.

A

Could you move the magnifier out of the way? yeah.? I can get it out of the way.

B

Yeah, you could minify. oh! boy, let's pop everything, up at the same time. there we go.

B

so,, I see you would right. Click inside of here, say, create c# script.

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and that's going to drop it inside of unity and then to edit,.

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You just double click on the script and it's going to open it up inside a visual studio, automatically.

B

so,. You know what a c# script, right?.

A

Like we're not talking about csx file.,.

B

No, no, no. it's full on honest to goodness real c#.

B

Right. so,, it's actually just a dll.

A

Like a compiled dll. at the end of the day, yeah,, when you.

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Spit all of this out, you will get what's called a,.

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There's a unity assembly.dll or something.

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Like that which is actually what contains all of your monobehaviours, all of the code that you've written inside of unity., I mean that's actually what's being executed on the client side.

A

Cool., let's talk about some of the backend services that use the kind of make this happen. right. sure.. So you know as you're building a game. I'm assuming,, it's just not a made device by itself.

A

Right. or a database and there's web services and there's assets and there's different things that you're pulling into kind of make. This thing work right.

B

A

What are some of the features that you needed, or you know you pulled into your apps and kind of make it do what it does today. yes., so for what I wanted to do was I wanted to.

B

Be a very simple game of take a picture,.

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Determine if it's the right thing or the point.

B

very simple, but I couldn't do all that locally on the device. right. cause'. Obviously you want the leaderboard,. You want to play against multiple people, every day..

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I want to have a new list of items, so I need to pull that list of items from somewhere in the world.

B

all of the assets and artwork and sound work with stuff that either was created by a friend of mine, who's, an artist, joey.. He did all. He created the logos and all that and I have no artistic ability, so I would need help. There.

B

sound effects came from a free, sound package that I found., but in terms of the services it uses extra functions,.

B

Which should there's show the code here inside of the server project.

A

I'm guessing using a year as her function as like an http endpoint,, I'm guessing.

B

Exactly,, that's all the http endpoint and we have. I think there are four of them, get daily items, which is exactly what it sounds. Like.

B

What are my five items that I need to find today.

B

item found, which is what, when you found the item.

B

We call that to say a word., the point essentially.

B

B

The playfab piece here, which does the log in and leader board, and what not and in just a couple of admin things so there's really only just a couple of functions that can drive this whole thing.

B

get daily items, for example, just goes in.

B

And we have a cosmos db back and uses.

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The hdp trigger in the document db binding in order to tie you to that database and using some simple link.

B

So, what's kind of eater,, this is all c# from end to end.

B

From unity all the way, through to your back and back to unity, again, it's all c#.!

B

We could have written this in node.. You could have used something else on the back end., but if you're a unid developer, you already know c# and extra functions be written in c#. So why would you use something else? Necessarily., that's what it should.. It makes sense..

B

So using some simple link here I can pull back a list of those five items and then put them into an array and send them back down to the client for display..

B

The client is essentially like a dumb terminal..

B

It's just displaying,. It's calling the service getting the list, calling the service to determine. If the object was found, calling the service to add the point,, it's just displaying what the server tells and you need that because you want to have a secure game..

B

This are cheaters,. There are cheaters everywhere., someone's always going to try to hack your game.

A

So,, making sure that you have.

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An authoritative game server in this case the games.

B

There is really what determines everything you're just displaying what the game servers is telling you, that's how most multiplayer games work..

B

I think another benefit that.

A

You get from that as well. Is that, like you're, taking that onboard processing and you're moving it somewhere, else.

B

Yeah exactly right.

A

So,, when you think about things like preserving the battery and not killing your user's phone, while you're using it.

B

A

Well then, I'm sure those things come up a lot in terms of like again,, deferring that compute to the cloud or somebody service.

B

They do, they do and there are games that are starting to use the cloud for things like physics. right., which can be very cpu, intensive and complicated. And if you're on a lower end machine, you necessarily want to burden the pc with that or.

B

The console with that you can run those simulations on the server and just send down to the client.. Well, this is what the world looks like now. yeah. display it. That way, you didn't have to do the calculation., I'm just telling you. This is what it looks like now.

B

got it.. So let's talk about really quickly,.

A

So what are some of the targets we have from unity.

A

so,? You showed us a mobile game, a little while.

A

yeah. right., but can I you know, I think you also mentioned the television. right. yeah., but so what are the other places I could send these? Can I carry it like xbox and playstation.

B

Yeah absolutely., you can do, mac,.

B

Linux and windows are kind of the, they're called the standalone build.. Those are the kind of the original, you can spit out to ios, android, xbox, playstation, nintendo switch.

B

Yeah. android, I don't know if I said that already I probably did. you really like android phones.

A

I really do like android phones., that's just me.

B

There are like the sam, there's, a samsung has a.net.

B

Platform that runs on their televisions- and I forgot the name.

A

Tizen. tizen,, I'm not sure.

B

If did we used to have a tizen exporter., I don't,, I haven't tried it lately to see that's left today.. You can even spit it out to webgl..

B

There's a-, oh nice., there's an output that will build a web page in.

B

Javascript and you can run your game in webgl in a browser.

B

if it was not too complicated. Sometimes it gets a little tricky but.

A

So tell me,: this is a bad analogy.

B

A

If it's a bad analogy, tell me and I'll, we could cut it from there.

B

We'll just cut it right out, that's fine.

A

Is unity kind of like the xamarin for mobile,.

A

For reading games in general, in terms of like I could write some code and I could have multiple targets.

B

A

I could deploy them to these multiple targets.

B

Absolutely., but I can have a shared like codebase., you can have shared codebase exactly and you can just like with xamarin, and you can, if def out parts of your code, where the process for doing something in android,, it's completely different for the process for doing something in ios and unity tries to create common interfaces for that in a many cases, but there are still some things that or the things do like the camera. Interface.

B

unity doesn't necessarily have a completely 100 percent generic camera.

B

yeah. so,. You can. If you want to write java code in order on android, to go talk to the camera., you can do that and that will only be compiled for the android version of your game..

B

If you want to do the same for ios in a swift or.

B

In objective c, you could do that.

B

Right. create these little libraries and things we know the guy calling it the xamarin of game development is pretty accurate.. I will say that mono game which we might talk about on a future episode, literally, is the xamarin of game development because it runs on top of xamarin on the other platforms.

A

Oh really. in many cases. yeah., oh nice, we got to talk about that one. absolutely., so this all sounds really good.. Why don't you tell us really quickly? What are some of the places that I could go to get started with unity.

A

sure, sure., a couple of links, open, here.,.

B

I would say I mean for unity itself, there is unity3d.com. If you want to go and download the engine., they have a ton of documentation and samples and things under learn.

B

If you want to run through those, they have some great samples and starter kits,.

B

So I want to write an rpg game.

A

They've got a starter kit for that or I want to do.

B

A platform where they kind of show you how to do that.

B

in terms of some of the azure stuff that I've been working on., we have our site called sandbox,, which is on docks. The microsoft.com like and will put a short link down in the video, but these are prepared, as the case that we know, are working with unity..

B

None of the caveats that we talked about with having to worry about il2cpp. These have been tested and or known working,, so you can go here and click on our unity tab and we have a handful of sdks and 3 or 4 samples as well, and how to use stuff like easy tables or facebook authentication from inside the unity editor.

A

Cool. well, awesome brian.. Thank you so much for coming on, brian.. That was pretty good.

B

Thanks for having me. get started with game development,, it's fun., it's not as fun as playing games, but it's still pretty fun.

A

Okay, so let me ask you this time.: what is your favorite unity game that you've played.

B

His favorite., I actually have an answer for this..

B

My favorite unity game is ori on the xbox. ori and the blind.

A

I love that game. forest, that is a unity game that has taken unity to.

B

A level for 2d that I don't think I've seen anywhere else., it's a beautiful game., the cuphead.

A

Would be an add-on cuphead, that's a unity game as well.

B

Is that a family friendly game?.

A

I don't think it's family friendly, game. no,, it is.

B

Is it? yeah. cuphead?, cuphead. yeah, it's the, you're, just fighting random enormous bosses,.

B

Like it's old school, like mega man, style bosses that just beat on you and it's really hard, but it's a fun game.

A

All right we're going to have to check it out.. Thank you again. Brian. thank you.. I really appreciate it. and here's another episode of the on.net show we just learned all about building mobile games and all different types of games with unity..

A