Unity Course Notes
My informal notes on a Unity course I am taking towards the Unity Certification!
Contents
- 1 Lesson 1 - Welcome to Unity Certified Developer Courseware
- 2 Lesson 2 - Managing Project, assets, game level
- 3 Lesson 3 - Lighting and animation
- 4 Lesson 4 - Intro Scripting in Game Dev
- 5 Lesson 5 - navigation / pathfinding / player allies enemies
- 6 Lesson 6 - Particle Systems
- 7 Lesson 7 - audio, camera, player selection, system, user interface
- 8 Lesson 8 - building and prepping for mobile deploy
- 9 Certification Exam
Lesson 1 - Welcome to Unity Certified Developer Courseware
Conducted by Koh Siang Leng, 5 Sept 2020, 10am
Note how some versions in unity hub have LTS and some do not.
Are you irritated cos unity updated and everything BROKE? Use version of unity LTS "Long term support" - a version which does not accept any new features but will be supported for about 2 years.
Economics of Games
Unity has its own ad platform which makes it easier for a developer to integrate advertising for monetisation. Analytics is used extensively in mobile gaming too. Should be integrated in from the very start... (How?)
Monetise in the form of...
- Physical Purchase
- Download
- Subscription
- Freemium
- In game purchase
- Advertising
Game Genres to think about...
- Action
- Adventure
- Arcade
- Fighting
- Non-Game (<-- probably me)
- Platformer
- Puzzle
- Racing
- RPG
- Shooter
- Simulation
- Sports
- Strategy
- Survival
- Open world etc
Game Design Document and Technical Design Document
- For small company - the document is nice to read but in practice sometimes along the way people do not update along the way as they are building and playtesting the game.
- For big company - there is probably a dedicated team doing this all day, that's their job to make the roadmap updated all the time!
Game Production Pipeline
Step 1 Pre-production
- Create the game design document and technical design document
Step 2 Production
- Implementing assets and creating game play
- building the game for release
Step 3 Maintenance
- Fixing bugs and releasing patches
- Incremental functionality improvements
Step 4 Upgrade
- Building and releasing new content
- Major additions and mods, such as new levels, seasonal content, special release (like upsize of your happy meal - it is easy to upsell when they are always interested in your product)
Job Roles
THEY WILL TEST THIS IN THE EXAM. take note on art director vs concept artist in particular.
- Concept art = provides unifying point for art direction (hence commonly confused with art director role)
Getting Started / User Interface
Install Visual Studio: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/ Link it as editor.
- What is the purpose of tagging? (common question in unity exam) - We say its used to find gameobjects (not grouping). It doesn't matter to Unity what is the gameobject tag. Its for the developer to find items with same tags.
Unity isn't the game for every sort of game. Can also consider Cocos-2dx.
Lesson 2 - Managing Project, assets, game level
Lesson 3 - Lighting and animation
Lesson 4 - Intro Scripting in Game Dev
Lesson 6 - Particle Systems
Lesson 7 - audio, camera, player selection, system, user interface
Lesson 8 - building and prepping for mobile deploy
Certification Exam
- 100 questions pulled randomly from a bank - mcq, drag and drop, matching, hotspot
- 90 mins to complete
- must score 70% to earn Unity Certified Developer