The new “Game Design Pipeline:
- Start middle school or new high school students in Ready Maker (GetReady.io), a cute little brother to Unity
- Transition from Ready Maker in Unity’s Playground Project
- Use the new Unity “Learn” platform (Launching June 2019) to transition into Unity by learning:
- C# fundamentals
- Unity basics
- VR development
Teaching Game Design - from Ready to Unity
Rock-Paper-Scissors Checkers
Teaching Game Design starts analog (See slide 6 below). Here, two students took the instructions of modifying or merging games to create an entirely new game that still has the spirit of the original in it. In this game, “RPS Checkers” Rock Paper Scissors was combined with Checkers. The rules are:
- Normal Checkers setup
- if one of your players gets jumped you have the option of using 1 of 3 “defends”. If you use a defend, Rock Paper Scissors is played with results of:
- Defender loses: Attacker gets kinged on the spot.
- Tie: Defender loses piece like normal checkers.
- Defender wins – piece is saved, nothing happens (Except the attacking piece is now on the other side!)
This RPS checkers set of rules completely changes the game, it is balanced, involves some sense of strategy (when to use defends) in addition to traditional checkers. It took these students over a month of failures and iterations of other modifications of Paper-Rock-Scissors to arrive at this functioning RPS Checkers. Game design iteration!
Slide Deck:
Transitioning into Unity using Unity Playground Project
If you are not ready to jump right into coding in C#, but want to give Unity a try, using their Playground Project (See the Unity blog post) is a great way to get started, no coding required.
Instead, users will be attaching pre-made scripts onto objects to create game logic.
