A New Unity E-Book on 2D Game Development

Unity released a cool new e-book which will be a great source of knowledge for game artists. The new book called 2D Game Art, Animation, and Lighting for Artists is a comprehensive guide to 2D development in Unity. 

The author of the book is Jarek Majewski, creative director of the free sample project Dragon Crashers, who wrote it with contributions from numerous Unity 2D experts.

2D Game Art, Animation, and Lighting for Artists is described as Unity's "biggest" e-book yet which covers a number of topics including project setup, roundtripping between Unity and various DCC software, working with sprites, normal maps, mask maps, and layer sorting, camera setup, animation, rigging, lighting, special shader effects, and optimizing the project.

Although the book mostly contains Unity-specific details, you still can find the information which can be applied to other game engines including sections on the principles of animation and lighting, comparison tables on the pros and cons of tilemaps, sprites and sprite shapes, skeletal and frame-by-frame animation, as well as shader-, particle-, and clip-based FX.

If you're learning Unity, you can find lots of useful tips and practices in this e-book. However, for those who are completely new to the software, the authors suggest starting with the beginner tutorials and courses which you can find at Unity Learn.

2D Game Art, Animation, and Lighting for Artists is available for free and can be found on Unity's official website here.

Check out this ebook and don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.