Introducing the game environment

Up until now, we've covered the basics of creating an environment. Next, we are going to create a new project that, with the help of a few extra assets, will become the framework for a game that we'll be creating in this course. So let's start by creating a new project. As we saw earlier, its name will appear in the Configuration dialog and on the title bar of the stand-alone. So let's name it something clever like UnitySampler. File > New Project > Create New Project. And I'm going to browse to the Desktop where I've got my folders. 03-04. And remember in Unity, the folder is the project, so I'm going to right-click and say new folder, and I'm going to name this UnitySampler, and select the folder.

Now for this game, for this project, we are going to need the Character Controller, the Scripts, Skyboxes, and the Tree Creator, and so we we'll create. Creating a nice terrain can take a while, even at the best of times, so I've saved out a Unity package with the terrain already created for you. Let's right-click. Import Package > Custom Package. And in the exercise files folder for this video/Assets, we're going to bring in MainLevel.

I'll click Open and then Import. And when we look in our Project view, we can see that it even has a scene for us. So let's double-click the MainLevel scene. We don't need to save the default. And here is our new scene. It comes with a terrain. And then the next asset we're going to need is some structures.

So right-click again, Import Package > Custom Package, and from the Assets folder again, bring in structures. And click Import again and here it goes. This time we have an imported Assets folder and we are going to bring Structures for Scene into our Hierarchy view.

This adds them to our scene and if we zoom up close, we can see that we've added a building and a few barricades. Our game, because it's really more of a game sampler, may be a bit silly, but it will be more fun than a disjointed set of technique videos. So here is a quick rundown of the project. It starts with three areas in a canyon-like space, a staging area--you can just see it here--a nature area.

The next one will be a dry rocky blasted- looking area with the dog leg so we can eventually hide a sentry system behind it. The next feature will be a stone-face building or compound, which we can see here. And then we've got a deep chasm and finally, a tall peak with a little ledge at the very top. So let's look and see a couple of things that are added to this. I've added a directional light so we can see the shadows.

If you're using Pro and you zoom in, you'll be able to see the dynamic shadows. If you zoom out, you can see they fade out. Besides the trees you've already worked with, we have a new addition in the nature area. It's a tree created with the Tree Creator. We'll cover the Tree Creator later in the series, but we'll make good use of the sample tree that came in with it. In the next video, we'll revisit the first-person controller to make sure that he can get around in our new scene.