Welcome to a new blog post that I will be running weekly. For those that do not know, I am currently in grad school working on a Masters in the Design and Development of Digital Games. "But Jacqueline, I thought your designed tabletop games?"
Well, you are correct. However I am interested in learning to develop digital versions of your favorite tabletop games, as well as crafting new ways to allow designers to playtest their games online.
On of my classes this semester dives into Unity and as part of the class I will be sharing my experiences learning this software. Did you know about 60% of video games are made using Unity? I learned that in class last night!
This blog is for those that are interested in following along with my progress and checking out my digital designs (and also for my grade). I will have weekly reflection prompts to share here, so stay tuned if this sounds interesting to you.
Here is what I learned to do in week 1!
For week 1 I was asked to reflect on the following questions:
What are your goals/fears/aspirations/concerns for this class?
My main goal for the class is to have fun. I have been enjoying learning to code so far from my other design courses, but learning new programming languages takes a really long time. I like the idea that I can use Unity without having to code everything from scratch. I am hoping to be able to make something for the VR space since I have never tried that before but I am intrigued by the concept of virtual reality and would love to learn more about how to bring ideas alive within it. Honestly, my only real concern is that I have no experience with Unity so I am starting at square 1, but I love learning and pick up on tech stuff pretty quickly so I think I will be alright!
What do you think will be the most challenging?
When it comes to design, I enjoy making things that look good in addition to playing well. Not knowing how to render my own 3d models means that I will need to source content that already exists to fit within my vision. From doing this for prototype art for tabletop games I know it can be a difficult process to get things to look the way you want.
What are your suggestions for making a 20+ person project-based class a success?
Let us work on projects alone and then share with partners or small groups for feedback.
Remind students that questions that pertain to only their project should be saved for office hours or asked in a 1 on 1 setting. I imagine the class can get bogged down quickly otherwise.
That's all for this week. Stay tuned for week 2!