Basic Game Art Concepts - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 21

artist's work with engines. Working with game engines seems overwhelming at first, but
if you take to heart the advice in this chapter about polygon count, topology, normals,
and the use of textures, you will find that providing art for a game can be relatively
painless.
Scripting Happens
Scripting is a topic that many aspiring game artists avoid like a plague but one that is nec-
essary to make great games. Scripting is the act of assigning behaviors to game art assets
through a scripting language . An engine's scripting language is a type of basic coding that
tells the engine how to make an object act while the game program is running.
Scripting is the other half of game art: Once you have an art asset, you need to give
the game engine directions so it knows what to do with the asset. A piece of game art, no
matter how amazing, is largely useless in a game without a script telling it what to do. It is
“all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
Many game engines have proprietary scripting languages. By contrast, Unity uti-
lizes three different, widely available languages for scripting: JavaScript, C#, and Boo.
JavaScript is a powerful language primarily used for adding functionality to websites. It
is also “object oriented,” which means that elements of code are organized according to
the object utilizing them. This makes object-oriented languages simple to understand for
newcomers. C#, another object-oriented language, is designed to operate on Microsoft's
.NET Framework, a framework for developing software in Windows. Boo is a derivative
of the open-source language Python, which itself emphasizes code readability. Python is
also the scripting language of Blender, which makes knowing Python and the languages
it has inspired a versatile skill.
If this sounds a bit over your head, fear not! When you encounter scripting in Chapter
10, you will not be alone. his topic will walk you through several useful scripts and how
to implement them in the Unity engine, which will put the interactive icing on the cake
for your game character project.
So, with all of your newfound game art knowledge, O intrepid DIY game designer, let
us venture onward into the frontier of 3D modeling and learn the basics of Blender, the
open-source 3D art environment!