Intro To Unity

In 2020, I was hired as an adjunct professor for Brookdale College in New Jersey to create and instruct a brand new class for their game design program, Intro to Unity. Over the 15 week semester I took students, who were not required to have any prior experience with coding or Unity, through an in depth study of what’s possible in game development. My students not only learned the ins and outs of the Unity editor but were challenged to be creative and develop a project of their choosing for their final task. I plan to keep developing the course and teach it again in the semesters to come.

The first unit of Intro to Unity focuses on fundamentals such as the Unity editor windows, beginning c# scripting, player input / movement, item collection, the UI canvas, and scene management. We start with the classic tutorial “Roll a Ball”, the Hello World of Unity dev, and grow that project into an original 3D platformer game complete with level design, enemies, and animation.

The second unit features an “Escape The Maze” style game. With this project students will be introduced to fundamental concepts like materials, lighting, and creating a health system. We cover all the texture maps that make up a material and explain a basic 3D art to game development workflow. Lighting topics include light types, direct vs indirect, emissive materials, and global illumination. We also build on our simple animated enemies from Unit 1 by creating AI driven enemies that chase the player around the maze!

Intro to Unity’s midterm project is to create a Pong style game. The only real requirement is for the game to be playable, but students are encouraged to be creative and take liberties to express themselves. I’m very proud, and impressed, by what they came up with.

For the third Unit we create a First Person Shooter game called “Zombie Hunter”. Here we study about character controllers, create a level with the terrain system, and write an audio manager to generate dynamic zombie sounds. We also learn how to create projectiles and shoot them with physics.

The final project is to develop a Unity project of your choosing. Students can build off of one of our previous unit projects or follow a tutorial series online, but they must take it further and make it their own in some way. They can concentrate on one topic such as level design or coding, or choose to go for it and make a complete game. We’ve had some fantastic results and have even had students publish their games online such as the game Vertex Ball by former student John Sochacki. John even created trailer for his game and made it free to play through his itch.io page!