[Disclaimer: I have been asked by Packt Publishing to review this book. I received a free e-book copy of the book as compensation.]
Unity 3D has always, despite its name, been used for 2D game development. Unity Technologies have realised that and have recently released an update to their game engine with better support for 2D game development. Obviously, it couldn’t take long until the first books on the topic were released.
Written in a very conversational tone, Unity 2D Game Development by Dave Calabrese is best suited for people that downloaded Unity and played around with it, but then never got any further. It is a longer tutorial, and it can help future game designers in taking their first steps within Unity and a 2D environment.
Unity 2D Game Development offers good advice and gives an introduction into commonly used programming patterns, such as events-based design and finite state machines; as well as an overview on how it is possible to create complex behaviours by combining basic scripts together with cleverly placed colliders.
The book does, however, occasionally sit in a somewhat uncomfortable spot. At times it does not seem to be able to decide on whether it actually requires previous knowledge of Unity or not. While some steps are being explained in painstaking detail, others are being glossed over.
As such, I’d recommend this book mostly for people that took their first steps in Unity, already worked through a few tutorials to learn the basic workflow, and now want to know more about creating 2D games in Unity.