[game_edu] Teaching with Unity and Playmaker

[Malcolm Ryan]

I’m teaching a first-year university game design class to a mixed of programmers and non-programmers. I’m looking for a game engine for them to prototype in. My wish-list is:

	1) A visual editor. Preferably something event based “when X do Y”.

	2) An interface between this editor and a scripting interface, so the programmers can write code and then use the components they’ve written in the visual editor.

	3) Games can be exported to the web and played online, for easy sharing.

	4) It feels like an “adult” tool, not a toy (unlike Kodu). Something they will actually continue to use later, and won’t be embarrassed to put on their resume.

	5) It is well-documented.

	6) It is multi-platform (Windows and Mac, at least)

	7) It is cheap/free (for educational customers)

At the moment I am looking into Unity + Playmaker, but the Playmaker documentation is a bit sparse and while the visual editor is good for representing state machines, it doesn’t seem to express reactive rules very clearly (like: "while up is pressed, move forward”). Has anyone tried teaching with this combination?

Malcolm