Weekly Assignments

Week One: Creating Your First Unity Game

Even the largest games can often be explained with reference to single core mechanic.
​For our first assignment you will create a small Unity game that focuses on a simple mechanic.​

Week Two: “Juicing” Your Unity Game

In this assignment you will be creating your first original game in Unity and a one-page design that details your creation. You will watch the seminal “Juice it or Lose it” online lecture and “Juice” your game from Assignment One in the process of making it into a new game. 

Week Three: Engineering Dual Purpose Design

Great design is a tangible goal we can engineer towards. Multi purpose mechanics are a fundamental tool for creating meaningful decisions within a game and fostering player agency. For this assignment, you will create the prototype of a  game which includes one or more examples of how a feature serves multiple purposes. Additionally, we will be learning how to use 3D models and character controllers to create a game from a wide array of possible genres.​

Week Four: Diegetic Design

As Lee Petty described, a game’s art is more than a visual or aural representation of the content. It often serves to relay its own set of information to the player. For this assignment you will explore diegetic design and the great impact it can have on the player’s suspension of disbelief. You will create a prototype 2D game and then incorporate examples of diegetic design within the game.

Week Five: Makin’ Stuff Look Good in Unity

In this assignment you will learn how to create your first shaders in Unity. Then you design and implement an original shader for use in your team project. 

Week Six: Midterm

This midterm assignment will require student teams to submit a prototype of their game. This prototype will first require a proposal approval from the teaching staff.

Week Seven: Building Immersive Worlds

In this assignment, you will explore the discipline of environmental storytelling and audio composition which can be used to create immersive experiences for your players.

Week Eight: Shipping & Marketing Your Game!

It’s time to ship your game! After two weeks of development you now have a small prototype to upload for people to begin downloading. This week we will be uploading your game to an online storefront in addition to creating a trailer for your game’s storefront presence.

Week Nine: Analytics

You’ve uploaded your game, fantastic! But now it’s time to ask, how are people interacting with it? Without analytics hooks, developers are left with only the number of downloads to sit and wonder what an average player’s user experience is like. In this assignment you will learn what tools are at your disposal to gain better insights into user engagement and determine how people are playing your game.

Final Project

After your midterm's project proposal, your team has worked hard on developing your game to its current state. You’ve added new features including shaders and environmental storytelling. You’ve collected a lot of feedback from friends on how to make the game better; and you have incorporated those improvements, with ample juice, into your final project.