Project Title

Jacob Pierce

Contact: LinkedIn

Currently, there are not resources to find straightforward Unity mechanic tutorials that are comprehendible, correct, and realistic. For example, there are YouTube videos that are lengthy and hard to follow for basic mechanics. Various forums such as Stack Overflow can also be more harmful to novice game developers by being outdated, time-consuming, or providing code snippets without being fully tested. Using the resources previously mentioned, these can make learning Unity a greater challenge than it needs to be, and cause discouragement among new game developers. 100 Unity Mechanics for Programmers strives to change these hardships by offering 100 uncomplicated game mechanics, of which all include: step-by-step tutorials, working demonstrations, and source codes for the developer to learn from and experiment with.

With previous game development experience and wanting to improve my skills, I joined this project last quarter to continue the work that was started by the previous capstone student. Last quarter, I worked alongside another capstone student to create these mechanics. We would communicate to each other to ensure that our in-progress mechanics were not redundant.

When brainstorming new mechanics to implement, I would think back to when I took Introduction to Game Development and the mechanics that I used or saw other game developers use. Another way I would come up with mechanic ideas was from video games that I was currently playing or games I had played before. Once I had an idea, I would then outline the idea by writing down the process of making it to make sure it was plausible and reasonable. After I was done implementing the mechanic, I created the step-by-step tutorial of what I did and created a WebGL demo of it. All of this was then compiled together and uploaded to the GitHub repository with the previously implemented mechanics.

Although the list of 100 mechanics is completed, future capstone students can be tasked to refine, improve, and keep each mechanic up to date, with the hopes of assisting novice game developers. The overall goal of the project is to maintain a helpful resource of basic and simple game mechanics to new developers.