[game_edu] Teaching with Unity and Playmaker

[Penny]

Hi Malcolm,

I teach a class also combined with artists and programmers.  This two pronged audience inspired by to write both my texts:
Holistic Game Development with Unity and
Holistic Mobile Game Development with Unity.

They both look at game development from the art for programmers and programming for artist sides.

I think Unity is the perfect tool for teaching game design and development.  Powerful, yet easy to use.  I've also got a tutorial I wrote called "Need for Speed" developing a simple racing game in Unity without any coding in 60 minutes if you are interested.

You can read more about my books at http://www.holistic3d.com

Cheers,
Penny

Dr Penny de Byl
Professor of Games and Multimedia
Bond University, Australia

> On 16 Oct 2014, at 12:15 pm, Bill Whetsel <billsclass at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Malcolm,
> 
> I teach with the Unity & Playmaker combination and it's a great solution.
> Students can get up and running very fast. I teach a series of courses in Game Design. 
> The audience is a combination of Artists, Designers and Programmers. 
> 
> I found most of the fundamental concepts in the Unity/Learn section can be emulated in Playmaker.
> 
> The Playmaker Forums are very helpful as well.
> 
> 
> Bill Whetsel
> Google+
> 
> 
> 
>> On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Malcolm Ryan <malcolmr at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
>> 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
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