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Online VT CS Module: Unity Crash Course for CS 4624

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Project Report (PDF) - with comments for editing (1.47 MB)
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Project Report (Word) (14.29 MB)
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Final Presentation (PDF) - with comments for editing (5.94 MB)
Downloads: 379

Final Presentation (PowerPoint) (4.92 MB)
Downloads: 248

Copy of contents of github repository (zip archive) (47.05 MB)
Downloads: 4599

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Date

2013-10-02

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Abstract

America’s entertainment software industry creates a wide array of computer and video games to meet the demands and tastes of audiences as diverse as our nation’s population. Today’s gamers include millions of Americans of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, more than two-thirds of all American households play games. This vast audience is fueling the growth of this multi-billion dollar industry (Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, 2006).

The Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech has offered a course to facilitate the future of art and game development. CS 4644: Creative Computing Studio Capstone is an intensive immersion into different approaches to game design and 3D modeling. The course allows students to develop an understanding of the scientific and technological principles associated with the design and development of computer and console games for both entertainment and serious applications. Students are encouraged to use a wide range of game engines as they work in teams to conduct an end-to-end integrative design project, the most popular being Unity.

Unity is a game development ecosystem: a powerful rendering engine fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows to create interactive 3D content; easy multiplatform publishing; thousands of quality, ready-made assets in the Asset Store; and a knowledge-sharing Community.

Unity is free to a large proportion of developers and affordable for the rest. For independent developers and studios, Unity’s democratizing ecosystem smashes the time and cost barriers to creating uniquely beautiful games. They are using Unity to build a livelihood doing what they love: creating games that hook and delight players on any platform. It is for this reason that our group decided to work with the professors of the Creative Computer Studio Capstone to deliver a module that will quickly get students up and running with Unity game development.

Videos are publicly available through the YouTube playlist:

http://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKFvhfT4QOqlEReJ2lSZJk_APVq5sxZ-x

All of the code is maintained in the public GitHub repository:

https://github.com/jm991/UnityThirdPersonTutorial?files=1

Description

The purpose of our project is to create a set of online cross-disciplinary tutorials for making games with the Unity game engine. The tutorials will cater to both art and computer science students enrolled in the Creative Computing Studio course. The tutorials also can serve as a guide for anyone interested in game development. Students will gain the knowledge to script game mechanic logic, develop camera devices through which the player views the world, and implement character controllers using preexisting animations through retargeting. By the end of the tutorials students should feel empowered and comfortable enough to begin creating their own games. The course is aimed at an intermediate level to meet the needs of Virginia Tech students who already know how to program or create 3D art, but don’t understand how to apply that knowledge to a game engine. This course is not intended as a step-by-step tutorial series; it takes a troubleshooting-based approach by addressing common pitfalls we encountered taking the gaming capstone in previous semester. Each of the videos can be watched individually to learn the related techniques. Students will learn and apply principles from the course not to a sample file, but to their own game's needs. Module Overview Legend of Zelda Wind Waker and Super Mario Galaxy are two examples of innovative platform games that revolutionized the third person cameras in a 3D environment. Both share similar mechanics that are simple, yet extremely robust. This module will recreate the same character locomotion and third person camera used by both games.

Keywords

Unity, computer game, video game, CS4644, Virginia Tech, Creative Computing Studio Capstone, game engine, tutorial

Citation

Persistent link

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/23859

Collections

CS4624: Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access