Game Production Process - Creating Games with Unity and Maya - page 5

Often, technology is being developed and has been developed when the
creative team delivers certain assets that are then plugged directly into
the game.
However, if you are working alone (and the assumption is that most readers
of this topic are doing just that) creation of assets in an appropriate order will
make the development process much more efficient. So to begin, let's look at
the assets needed for the game produced in this topic.
Assets
Once the Game Design Document is completed, the lead designer will need
to start working out what assets need to be created and when they need to
be done. Assets can be a lot of things: 2D elements like GUI and interface
designs, texture files, 3D models, sound files, animation clips, as well as things
like scripts and other mechanisms that drive the game. For this topic, we will
focus on two categories of assets: art assets and scripting assets.
Art Assets
For the tutorials covered in this game we will need three art-based assets:
models, textures, and animations. The models and animations will be created
in Maya while the textures will be created in Photoshop, but linked to the
models within Maya. Other visual elements like lighting will take place in both
Maya and Unity (depending on which version of Unity you are using).
Technology Assets (Scripts)
Unity allows for mechanics to be built with a variety of scripting
mechanisms. Most reference or discussion you will find will be in either
Unity's implementation of JavaScript or C#. These scripts are attached to an
object or objects within your Unity scene and drive the interaction between
the player and the game.
There are many approaches for tackling the scripting problem. My software
engineer colleagues that I work with extensively here make heavy use of C#
and drive nearly everything in the game (including creation and placement
of assets) with these scripts. They understand the structure of the game when
they can see the script that is doing it.
The scripts we will be creating will primarily use Unity's version of
JavaScript, and we will (with a few instantiation exceptions) hang
these scripts off of objects we manually place within the scene. We
use JavaScript because historically, the documentation's examples are
primarily in JavaScript, and referencing Unity's documentation in the
future will be a necessity when moving beyond the scope of this topic and
it will be important to have an established vernacular with the provided
documentation. Likewise, much of the discussion that takes place on