[game_edu] Teaching with Unity and Playmaker

[Allan Fowler]

Hi Malcolm,

I have been using Unity for a while now and feel it addresses most of your needs. The price is a little high if you want/have to pay for the licence. I have also been using UDK and GameMarker Studio. However, my preference for using Unity is that coding is a lot more user friendly, as you can (mostly) use open access programming languages (JavaScript, C#). I realize that the other choices may also offer this (now). But in my opinion, Unity does it better.

Allan

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 12:51:26 +1100
From: Malcolm Ryan <malcolmr at cse.unsw.edu.au>
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv <game_edu at igda.org>
Subject: [game_edu] Teaching with Unity and Playmaker
Message-ID: <7BA64EDA-4B62-400B-AA50-DDA2F2101E4E at cse.unsw.edu.au>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

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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