Ask Me Anything About Unity

Student-requested topics including ECS, Job System, Databases, Augmented Reality, Procedural Animation, AI and more.

What you'll learn:

• Apply a diverse set of new game development skills to find custom solutions in implementing their own game mechanics.

What do YOU want to know about Unity but have been afraid to ask? Do you think your questions are too trivial to become an entire course? Every day DrPenny de Bylreceives messages from her students asking for assistance on a wide variety of topics that would benefit from a short tutorial. In this course, Penny puts her 25 years of game development, research and teaching into practice to answer your questions in a variety of popular short workshop based tutorials.

Topics covered include:

1. The Unity Entity Component and Job System

2. Targeting Missiles

3. In-game Quest Systems

4. Reading and Writing to a Database

5. Animating Facial Expressions

6. Introduction to Augmented Reality for Android and iOS

7. Object Pooling

8. Working with Asset Bundles

Contents and Overview

Section 1:
The course begins with a section examining the new Unity Entity Component and Job System where you will build a planet simulation with 50,000 planets that orbit and are under the gravitational influence of four suns.

Section 2:
Following this, a section examining the creation of target-seeking missiles will cover basic line of sight missiles that remain locked onto a target, after being fired, as well as the addition of a waypoint system that gives missiles interesting curved and funky trajectories.

Section 3:
The next section steps through the ground-up creation of an in-game quest system. Starting with a simple third person game environment, you will build a quest system which monitors player progress, as well as cover the Unity fundamentals of the UI system to support its presentation.

Section 4:
In this section you will learn how to access an online database from inside Unity to store game data. Through the use of a free online database service, you will follow along as we create a database and write simple PHP, mySQL and C# to link a Unity application with player details stored on an external server.

Section 5:
If you've ever wanted to add real-time facial animations to your own characters to bring them alive, this section is for you. In it you will add emotional expressions to a character and learn how to blend between them with code. We will also add extra believability to the character by adding blinking and eye gaze dynamics.

Section 6:
Want to learn how to make augmented reality on your mobile phone? This section will step you through developing several augmented experiences that you can try on your Android or Apple devices. Using the Wikitude SDK with a special student license just for being enrolled, you'll have your first AR app up and running in 5 minutes.

Section 7:

Object Pooling is a very popular game design pattern that will help you save on memory usage. It's great if you need to create a lot of resources, such as bullets or obstacles. This section will show you how to build such a system that can be applied anywhere in your own games, through the development of an asteroid shooting game.

Section 8:

In this section you will learn how to work with Unity's Asset Bundles. These are external resources that you can call into your game at any time. You'll learn how to create an Asset Bundle from scratch and then how to load them into your project at runtime, from both a local drive as well as an online URL. I'll also show you how to load and swap player characters at runtime and how to expand the bundle after a games release to continue to bring in new content.

What students are saying about Penny's courses:

1. Penny is an excellent instructor and she does a great job of breaking down complex concepts into smaller, easy-to-understand topics.

2. Penny's teaching style is exceptionally well-motivated and illustrated.

3. This course is awesome. The lecturer explains everything you need to know and encourages you to experiment and challenge yourself.