Hallow Games

West Virginia video game development

Leading Unity Workshop

By

Leading the Unity Workshop was probably one of the best things I did this semester.  The first ideas for this came in the Spring semester when it was discussed briefly among officers and the club.  Up to that point, we had a couple of tutorials on Unreal and Blender that we worked through at meetings, but an hour really wasn’t enough time to work through the basics of the engine and get comfortable with it.  I also had several people approach me and ask about how I learned about Unity, as I have mostly self taught myself through several books and online classes.

So one of the goals that was set early on for the club this semester was having the Unity workshop – and I also felt more comfortable doing it in the fall versus that spring after gaining more experience teaching that summer at iD Tech, which I have also covered here.

In the workshop, I covered the basic Unity Interface, creating and manipulating objects, and then we moved on to making a basic platformer and designing the levels.  Overall, I think it was a success but there were several things looking back on it that I could have probably done better.  One is that it is hard to keep a huge group on the same task, as everyone moves at different speeds.  I felt bad because I knew some people were going through it very quickly.  However, others had never programmed before in their lives and struggled with it.  We also had several technical hiccups out of my control and I had said to those attending the event to have it installed on your computer BEFORE coming to the workshop (if they chose to bring their own), but some still came and wanted to install it there, so they were all behind from the start.

In closing, I am very grateful to the WVU library (Beth Toren and Rodney Adlington especially) and them working with our club to install Unity on the Macbooks and testing it out and making sure everything was working before the day of the event.  Also the event would not have gone as smoothly as it did without the help from my assistants Destiny Dunn, Connor Haynes, and Ryan Kubik, who I had taught the workshop to several weeks prior as a trial run, and in return, they helped me teach the twenty students we had at the event.  Shout out to Ryan also for the poster design for the event.