• Currently through January 24
• This will be week by week

One projection for California

• Read through the slides and get started on the W2 self-assessment assignment

• Come up with questions, preferably starting with "why"

• I will chat with you in pairs outside, and ask you for your question

• At the end we will do a somewhat silly self-intro

Curiosity

Persistence

Creativity

Forgiveness

About the Course

• Unity the application

• C# and the Unity API (how you talk to it from code)

• Visual Studio, a tool for writing code

• Perforce, a tool for managing code

• Tools and techniques specific to game development

image credit: Sascha Kasper

image credit: devops.com

This part of the curve feels terrible

image credit: Wikimedia

Learning is feeling like you don't know what you're doing and making mistakes.

image credit: Wikimedia

Procedural knowledge

     set up a collision, import an animation

Conceptual knowledge

    what is a component? what is the game loop?

Abstract reasoning and pattern recognition

    should I use a list here? what is the information in
    my game and how will I represent it?

Kinds of Learning

image credit: Wikimedia

A lot of what you do in Unity consists of following a procedure like "click this, type that".

Many of these procedures are very long, with dozens of steps.

What can you do to manage this?

Memorize the Odyssey

Challenge:

Make Your Life Harder

• Compare yourself to others, or tell yourself you're bad at game dev
• Don't take notes or synthesize
• Expect no bugs
• Assume that anything is easy :}
• Only work with friends

Discord, Drive, Perforce

These tools are an extension of the classroom. Be polite and professional.

Don't understand the homework? Need tech support?

#questions channel

Going to be absent? Have a question about a grade?

DM me on Discord

Please don't email me.

About You

• You're a smart, talented, hardworking person
• You've got some familiarity with Unity
• You've worked with code, even if you don't feel comfortable with it
• You want to understand Unity better so you can use it as a creative tool

Try this!

Create a cube (or sphere or capsule or cylinder):

GameObject -> 3D Object -> Cube

What changes?

image credit: gigi.nullneuron.net

Try this!

Press the W key.

Then click on the cube in the Scene and drag it around.

What changes while you are dragging? (There are at least two things on screen that change.)

Try this!

Now create a Material:

Assets -> Create -> Material

What changes?

Try this!

Hint: it's not the Scene view or the Inspector. Keep making materials if you need to.

image credit: noobtuts.com

Editor Panels

• Project - Your files
• Hierarchy - Your game level
• Scene - Also your game level
• Game - Your game (when it's running)
• Console - Messages from Unity and your scripts
• Inspector - The components of whatever you've selected

Try this!

Create an empty GameObject:

GameObject -> Create Empty

Click on it and look at the Inspector.

Try this!

Create a Light:

GameObject -> Light -> Directional Light

Click on it and look at the Inspector. What is different?

Try this!

Click on your cube again.

1. Look at the Inspector and find the component called "Cube (Mesh Filter)".
2. Click on the tiny target on the right side. You'll see a little window.
3. In the window, choose Cylinder.

Try this!

You'll see something like this. Can you tell what's going on?

Try this!

The green shape is the Collider, which is still a box. But the Renderer component was told to render a cylinder.

So in the game it looks like a cylinder, but will act like a box as far as physics.

Components need information

Transform: three sets of three numbers

Mesh Filter: mesh (file)

Box Collider: numbers for gravity etc.

Mesh Renderer: material (file)

Some engines are specialized. For example, Twine makes it easy to write interactive text stories.

RPGMaker has special tools for making role-playing games, like inventory, maps, and skill trees.

Twine image credit: pixelkin.org, RPGMaker image credit: softpedia.com

The alternative would be writing your own code to

• read and write files
• read in a 3d model, add perspective, lighting and shadows, and turn it into pixels
• check for collisions between objects
• process input from the serial port

Tradeoffs

• You can only make games for the platforms (PlayStation, Android, OS X) that the engine supports
• You have to understand how the engine works
• You are accepting a particular idea of what a game is and isn't. For example, Twine thinks a game is a text story and it would be hard to make an FPS with it

Image credit: Bitmoji

Image credit: Hyperbole and a Half

Changing a habit is the hardest thing.

Make sure you succeed early and often.

Look forward and imagine setbacks.

When you fail, treat it as a problem to solve.

A scene contains GameObjects.

Image credit: Nintendo, via gamerevolution.com

GameObjects in turn have components that determine what they do.

So this is one way to think about the hierarchy.

If an object moves or collides with other objects, it needs physics components like colliders and rigidbodies.

Other built-in Unity components can help with networking, animation, AI, audio, and more.

When you write a C# script, it's just one more kind of component.

Unity can do things like play animations and simulate things colliding without any code.

With code, you can tell Unity to respond to events: move things when the player presses a key, play a sound when two objects collide, and so on.

The Core Loop

Unity gives you ways to tie into different parts of its core loop from code and tell it what to do. This is what you're doing when you write code for Unity – hooking into things it's already doing.

We'll talk about the details more in the next class.

The Core Loop

Syllabus Highlights

• Late work policy
• Attendance
• Grading of Unity homework
• Academic integrity

1. Ask me to explain or show something again. I am happy to do this. Interrupting is okay.
    
2. If you have a problem that's only affecting you, e.g. in a lab or demo, you can message the SA on Discord.

In class

Academic Integrity

• It's normal and good to copy or adapt someone else's code. If you copy 3 or more lines and do not modify them, you must provide credit.
• Provide credit (usually just a URL) for all art, sound, and other assets that you don't personally make.
• You'll get a template with a bare-bones credits scene in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile you can provide a Google doc with your builds.