Project Title

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Jordan E Lawson

Contact: LinkedIn

Working with a large, complex game engine, such as Unity, presents unique challenges to developers. Currently, developers must research how a specific gameplay mechanic works in Unity before they can implement it as part of their game. Unfortunately, information from online sources are often buggy or badly implemented. Even when a developer finds a solution, adopting it can take a long time.

The 100 Unity Mechanics for Programmers project aims to resolve these issues in the following way:

  1. All mechanics are implemented in the simplest form possible;
  2. Each mechanic has a clear working demo that shows the mechanic in action;
  3. A step-by-step tutorial demonstrates how to replicate the mechanic; and
  4. Source code for each mechanic is included to allow easy editing, copying and experimentation.
Our goal is to speed up adoption of the mechanic from demo to being integrated into a larger project by providing the building blocks directly to the developer. In this project, I built on top of the work that was started by a previous capstone student, Nick Young, while brainstorming new mechanics and creating an extended roadmap of features. When starting on a mechanic, I would conduct research in user forums and web based repositories. Based on what I learned, I would then create a Unity Project that showed off the mechanic, prioritizing making the demo appear as a functional game, to help give an idea on what the mechanic could be used for. After completing the demo, I would write out a step-by-step tutorial based and upload to GitHub.

With all these mechanics and their tutorials/demos available in one place, a developer does not need to waste valuable time finding a working or descriptive tutorial online that offers the source code to the project and any one game could use many mechanics. Professor Yusuf Pisan has made this project with iteration in mind which is why multiple students have worked on it. Once the 100 mechanics are all done, future capstone students can iterate on the project by reviewing mechanics and seeing if there are better ways to implement them.

Game Development is a difficult and daunting task. As a community we need to make game development (and computer science) more accessible to everyone and easier-to-understand. The 100 Unity Mechanics Project is one of the many steps being made in that direction.