I suggest you take an introductory Unity course first, work on some prototypes until you’re comfortable with programming and then read the books. If you haven’t coded a game in the past it’s likely that these books are not for you.

If you can code your own logic in C# scripts inside Unity you’re good to go.

You’ll need some understanding on programming. The series is aimed at independent game developers that want to make their own 2D games visually unique. I found out that there is a sub-set of basic techniques that are pretty useful in 2D, and don’t require you to learn a lot of the 3D stuff, specially lighting models, the first thing that every shader tutorial/book talks about. Most of the books and tutorials are about 3D, and one may thing that transfering that knowledge to 2D is easy. In the past few years, while working on Nubarron, I got really frustrated about the lack of information on how to design shader effects in 2D. This book is the first in a series of 4 books and will provide you with the basic understanding of what a shader is, why we need them, how colors are represented, how to display a texture on screen, and how to mix colors using blending modes. Good artists are great at creating amazing characters and environments but programmers can open a whole new world of possibilities and customization by leveraging the power of shaders.

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