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Video Game Design

Syllabus

Unit 1: Unity Essentials

Week 1: Introduction to Video Game Design

  • Understand the rules and policies of the course and expectations of you as a contributing member of our learning community.
  • Begin to build community by sharing important information with your teacher and classmates about yourself and your school.
  • Develop your skills for navigating the course environment and using the various course tools.
  • Download and install Unity on your school and/or home computer.
  • Import and play a game made with Unity.
  • Create a Unity and Microsoft account.

Week 2: Unity GameObjects

  • Explain the capabilities of the Unity 3D real-time engine.
  • Identify the industries and applications for real-time creation.
  • Create 3D objects in the Unity editor and apply transforms, materials, and lights.
  • Publish a Unity Project to Unity Play.

Week 3: Audio and Scripting in C#

  • Create a new script component that prints a message to the console.
  • Explain the relationship between scripts and components.
  • Implement audio that appears to come from a point in 3D space vs no place in particular.

Week 4: 2D Gaming

  • Create a 2D project and manipulate 2D objects in Unity.
  • Find and import 2D assets from the Unity Asset Store.
  • Describe the steps in a real-time production cycle.
  • Research possible careers in video game design using a job search engine.

Unit 2: Junior Programmer

Week 5: Vehicle Control

  • Improve simple code using the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment.
  • Implement appropriate data types to store information.
  • Apply a camera movement smoothing script to a vehicle.
  • Write scripts that will listen to keyboard presses.

Week 6: Basic Gameplay

  • Create scripts to spawn animal prefabs at random locations.
  • Create primitive shapes and rename, reposition, scale, and apply materials to them.
  • Implement trigger scripts that respond to collisions.

Week 7: Sound and Visual Effects

  • Create a side-scrolling runner game with music, sound, and particle effects.
  • Apply RigidBody physics to control basic movement from user input.

Week 8: Gameplay Mechanics

  • Add rules to a game via scripting and spawn enemy waves.
  • Program powerups to give players an advantage.
  • Destroy objects off-screen to save memory.

Week 9: User Interfaces

  • Create a menu of buttons to choose the difficulty of a game.
  • Add a Game Over screen that allows the player to restart.
  • Replace primitive GameObjects with assets from the Unity Asset Store.

Unit 3: Creative

Week 10: Terrain and Pro-Builder

  • Use the Unity Terrain tool to build terrain with at least three mountains and two lakes.
  • Color the terrain so that there are roads, grass, and bushes in the landscape.
  • Use the Pro Builder tool to create a small house with ramps, windows, and doors.

Week 11: Shaders, Materials, and VFX

  • Explain how surfaces in Unity are defined and rendered.
  • Create a simple shader using a Shader graph.
  • Create materials that control how light reflects off a GameObject.

Week 12: Animation

  • Configure a humanoid rig for use with the Unity animation system.
  • Create a simple keyframed 3D animation sequence.
  • Control the field of view of the Main Camera by adjusting the frustum.

Week 13: Lighting

  • Create appropriate lighting in a manner that will simulate the real-world behavior of light.
  • Add and configure directional, point lights, spotlights, and shadows to your scene.
  • Utilize light and reflection probes to reduce game latency.

Unit 4: Final Project

Week 14: Creating and Testing Your Game

  • Create a post-processing profile to affect the visual style and fidelity of a game.
  • Create and apply global and local post-processing volumes.
  • Add two more significant modifications to the final project.

Week 15: Presenting Your Game

  • Take the final exam.
  • Provide course feedback via the VHS Student survey.
  • Submit the final video game project.