Curriculum Framework...

Hi All!
I am a teacher in New Jersey and I started a Game Design course. I am excited to use the UCF and I was wondering if there is anyone else who has used it that would be able to discuss how to go about starting one of the lessons.

Hope to hear from someone soon.
Thanks!!
-Joe

 

"UCF" is Unity Community Forums?

The two ways we did it, which were fine, were to start with non-Unity coding; modding a premade Unity game. Which way depends on your students. But then this was a full-on game design program - not sure how it would work in just one course. I think is very, very depends of the backgrounds and expectations of the students.

#1) Visual Studio using Forms is an easy way to start with game-oriented C# programming. Easy to move things around, get button clicks, or even use a Timer to make an Update function. Then when you move to Unity, students can see it's the same code, but you have to work a little harder to use it in the 3D environment. Games would use a lot of place-holder assets, like colored cubes.

#2) Treat the scripts as pre-made assets and mostly ignore coding. Then you can focus on importing images and 3D models, how physics works, particle systems, tweaking Inspector variables, prefabs and colliders -- all in the context of how to build-out the third-person shooter, or whatever. The thing, is, there probably wouldn't be time to explain how to make models or good textures or use Mechanim ... .

I think it comes down to limiting your scope to what it seems like students want to see. Method two is really an overview of general game design. The goal is to get students to see if they want to focus on game art, or learn coding, or modelling. Version one is if you know students will ask how to make a tile-matching game, and a 2D space shooter, and Angry Birds and won't be happy until they see that coding is how you make anything you can imagine.