Using Unity to Teach Game Development

Vladyslav S. Kuznetsov

, Mykhailo V. Moiseienko

1 a

, Natalia V. Moiseienko

1 b

Bohdan A. Rostalny

and Arnold E. Kiv

2 c

Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, 54 Gagarin Ave., Kryvyi Rih, 50086, Ukraine

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer Sheva, 8410501, Israel

Keywords:

Computer Science, Education, Computer Game Development, Unity Engine, Software Engineering.

Abstract:

The article gives an overview of issues arising in connection with the organization and conduct of the course

“Computer game development” in the master’s program 014.09 Secondary education (Informatics). The study

of the experience of similar courses in other educational institutions does not give an idea of what conditions

are the best for conducting it, because “Computer game development” is mainly present in the curriculum of

the Software Engineering specialty and is not limited to one course. The game development course is described

in terms of content, software and teaching methods. This course, which was attended by 40 students in three

years, was evaluated in the light of the approach proposed by A. D. Ritzhaupt and based on the students’

opinion. As a result of this research, it was concluded that a course in video game development could be based

on the Unity Engine, as it has a small entry threshold, free for academic purposes, a crossplatform, real game

engine, common in the gaming industry. A team strategy for this course is also effective.

1 INTRODUCTION

The software industry is a dynamic and market-

oriented industry (Vakaliuk et al., 2020b). Along with

the ﬁlm industry, video games are one of the most

interesting and popular applications of information

technology (Haranin and Moiseienko, 2018; Katsko

and Moiseienko, 2018).

Gamesindustry.biz journalists, along with analysts

from Newzoo, UKIE, Sensor Tower, IHS Markit, ICO

Partners and Fancensus, published a large infographic

on the state of the game industry in 2020 (ﬁgure 1).

It implies that computer games occupy a signiﬁcant

segment of the software market.

Educational institutions that train software engi-

neers include game development as a set of relevant

subjects in the curriculum. The reasons for their in-

clusion are diverse and include, inter alia, improving

the effectiveness of the curricula (Barnes et al., 2007;

Claypool and Claypool, 2005; Morrison and Preston,

2009; Roden and LeGrand, 2013; Sung, 2009), in-

creasing the competitiveness of graduates in the mod-

ern labour market (Haranin et al., 2017; Vakaliuk

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4401-0297

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0789-0272

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0991-2343

Figure 1: Global Games Market Value 2020 (Batchelor,

2020).

et al., 2020a), learning team work (Brown et al., 2009;

506

Kuznetsov, V., Moiseienko, M., Moiseienko, N., Rostalny, B. and Kiv, A.

Using Unity to Teach Game Development.

DOI: 10.5220/0010933400003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 2, pages 506-515

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

Rankin et al., 2008) and project management (Barnes

et al., 2007; Claypool and Claypool, 2005).

Despite this, many higher education institutions

carefully include such courses for a variety of reasons,

including the need to create games of some interdis-

ciplinary skills, time constraints, lack of interest and

experience among teachers in teaching games or the

view that game development is not serious (Becker

and Parker, 2007; Martin and Smith, 2002).

As teachers of Computer Science at Pedagogical

University, we consider the inclusion of a variation

course of computer game development in the curricu-

lum of Masters 014.09 Secondary Education (Infor-

matics) as a way to increase the level of motivation,

engagement and professional pleasure for students.

The purpose of this article is to give an idea of

the creation of a separate game development course,

an overview of the methodology and tools used in its

construction and the conclusions drawn so that teach-

ers without experience, all of which have set such a

course, have been able to avoid unnecessary waste

of time. We describe our experience in creating an

individual game development course using the Unity

Game Engine (Unity Technologies, 2021). The aim

of this course is to familiarize students with the de-

velopment of games using the software available in

industry. We focus on problem solving, project plan-

ning, SDK work, and teamwork, and see this course

as a way to entertain and motivate students.

2 BACKGROUND

The ﬁrst task of the game development course was to

select an approach. Deﬁning the content, goals and

objectives of game development is an important step,

especially in the light of limited material and time re-

sources.

A review of publications on the subject shows that

the implementation of training programmes on game

development is quite diverse. It varies from individual

courses (Jones, 2000; Parberry et al., 2005; Sweedyk

and Keller, 2005) and the inclusion of relevant sec-

tions in the traditional computer science program

(Coleman et al., 2005) before the course sequence

(Clark et al., 2007; Fachada and C

odices, 2020; Par-

berry et al., 2006; Rocco and Yoder, 2007; Prokhorov

et al., 2021). Content of individual courses from the

use of engines developed for training (Gamemaker

(Claypool and Claypool, 2005), RPG Maker (Barnes

et al., 2007), Alice (Werner et al., 2012)), develop-

ment of own game engines (Labyrinth (Distasio and

Way, 2007; Shultz, 2004), CAGE (Vanhatupa, 2011)),

technical design (Parberry et al., 2006), Flash (Estey

et al., 2010) to a complete game development training

course covering all aspects of the game (Jones, 2000;

Martin and Smith, 2002).

The idea of developing a proprietary engine seems

tempting at ﬁrst, but, in experience, does not pay for

itself by the time it takes, and eventually students will

never see it again after the course (Dickson, 2015).

The real game engine should simplify and speed up

the development process and allow students to create

interesting games in a short period of time. The prob-

lem of ﬁnding the most suitable game engine for this

course is not very simple, and there are different opin-

ions on this issue from the XNA Game Studio library

to Unity and Unreal (Dickson, 2015; Dickson et al.,

2017; Unreal Engine, 2021; Harris, 2011; Linhoff and

Settle, 2008; Parberry et al., 2005; Peng, 2015). Dick-

son (Dickson, 2015) offers to use the Unity game en-

gine (Unity Technologies, 2021) to teach game de-

velopment. Given its widespread use in the industry

(de Macedo and Rodrigues, 2011; Toftedahl and En-

gstr

om, 2019) and even for teaching game develop-

ment in the middle school (Comber et al., 2019), this

seems logical.

There are also several important CS sections di-

rectly used in the development of computer games:

the basics of physics, multimedia, network basics,

computer graphics, and the basics of game artiﬁcial

intelligence (Ahlquist and Novak, 2007; Millington,

2019; Yannakakis and Togelius, 2018).

Game design usually refers to the design of

the game and focuses on story, mechanics, charac-

ter modelling, environment, process content genera-

tion, etc., which is enough material to take a whole

semester without going into too much detail. There

are many textbooks covering these broad topics, such

as (Adams, 2013; Ahlquist and Novak, 2007; Saulter,

2007; Bond, 2014). These areas are compulsory for

the course.

3 SELECTING THE SOFTWARE

Once the approach to the gaming course was deﬁned,

the next question we faced was what tools to use to

create games.

More recently, developers have made widely

available many powerful game engines and devel-

opment environments that provide functionality for

video game development. An overview of some of

the best known is presented below.

Godot Engine (Bradﬁeld, 2018; Manzur and Mar-

ques, 2018)

Cost and Licensing: Completely free and open

source under the permissive MIT license.

Using Unity to Teach Game Development

507

System Requirements (minimum): Memory: 4 GB,

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6200, CPU: Intel

Core 2 Duo E8400, OS: Windows 7.

Platforms: Linux, Windows, OS X, Wii, Nintendo

3DS, PlayStation 3, PS Vita, Android, iOS, BBX,

web-games with asm.js, NativeClient.

Overview and Features: Godot Engine is a

feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create

2D and 3D games from a uniﬁed interface. It pro-

vides a comprehensive set of common tools, so users

can focus on making games without having to rein-

vent the wheel. Games can be exported in one click

to a number of platforms, including the major desk-

top platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows) as well as

mobile (Android, iOS) and web-based (HTML5) plat-

forms.

Unity Engine (Unity Technologies, 2021)

Cost and Licensing: Personal Free version (your

project revenue or funding cannot exceed $100,000 a

year), Unity Pro package $125 per month (includes

an impressive amount of services not included in the

free version).

System Requirements (minimum): Graphics Card:

DX10, DX11, and DX12-capable GPUs, CPU: X64

architecture with SSE2 instruction set support, Win-

dows 7 (SP1+) and Windows 10, 64-bit versions only.

Platforms: Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8,

BlackBerry, PS3, Xbox360, Wii U and web-browsers.

Overview: Unity is a cross-platform game engine.

The engine can be used to create 2D/3D, virtual real-

ity, and augmented reality games, as well as simula-

tions and other experiences (Axon, 2016; Takahashi,

2018). The engine has been adopted by industries out-

side video gaming, such as ﬁlm, automotive, architec-

ture, engineering and construction.

Features: Creating and Destroying GameOb-

jects, Access the Components, Events for GameOb-

ject, Dealing with Vector Variables and Timing Vari-

ables, Physics Oriented Events, Coroutine and Return

Types.

Unreal Engin (Unreal Engine, 2021)

Cost and Licensing: Free (5% royalty on gross

revenue more than $1,000,000).

System Requirements (minimum): CPU: Quad-

core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster,

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD

Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher, RAM: 8 GB

Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later.

Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8,

Xbox360, PS 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii U.

Overview and Features: Unreal Engine is a com-

plete suite of development tools for anyone working

with real-time technology. From design visualiza-

tions and cinematic experiences to high-quality games

across PC, console, mobile, VR, and AR, Unreal En-

gine gives you everything you need to start, ship,

grow, and stand out from the crowd.

XNA Game Studio (Harris, 2011; Linhoff and Set-

tle, 2008; Miles, 2011)

Cost and Licensing: Free download from Mi-

crosoft site.

System Requirements (minimum): Graphics Card

Shader Model 1.1 support, DirectX 9.0 support, Op-

erating System: Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7 (All

editions except Starter).

Platforms: Windows, Xbox 360, Zune.

Overview and Features: XNA Game Studio 2.0 –

application framework, integrated development en-

vironment. Features: Game component models,

New framework library designed to support Microsoft

Windows, XBOX 360, and Zune game development,

Integration with XNA Framework Content Pipeline.

From an analysis of the capabilities of the video

game development tools described, it can be con-

cluded that they are all quite powerful. The choice

of a speciﬁc tool is determined by the characteristics

of the project being developed. Their use for educa-

tional purposes is almost equal, although the choice

may be inﬂuenced by the size of the proposed course.

The second parameter to choose the instrument

was its cost. All the tools described are free of charge

for educational purposes and thus meet our needs.

The third, perhaps most essential, requirement is

compliance with the minimum system requirements

of the equipment and associated software. State ed-

ucational institutions are at a disadvantage in this re-

spect. Therefore, for the ﬁrst version of the course

“Computer game development” in our university was

chosen Microsoft XNA Game Studio, which has a

narrower range of possibilities.

We assumed that the experience of our students

in C/C++ and C# programming would allow them

to easily learn XNA. However, we were wrong. By

the end of the course, many of them were halfway to

the games. The greatest success was achieved by the

group of students who developed the Tower Defence

class game, but it was completed as part of the bache-

lor’s qualiﬁcation work.

The problem with this approach is that in order for

students to feel the process of developing games, they

need an environment that they can easily use to create

games. The focus of the course was to make the game

good, not just work at all. We wanted our students to

have experience working with a real engine, real skills

if they decided to develop games.

The situation improved after the computers at our

university were upgraded. We were able to work with

a serious game engine. We decided to use the Unity

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508

Table 1: Course part 1. Basics of work in Unity.

Topics Duration,

hours

Course materials Deliverables

1. Introduction to

Unity

3 Unity features. Examples of games created on Unity. Unity instal-

lation. The difference between 2d and 3d design. Overview of the

main elements of the scene: Camera, GameObject, Direction Light.

Moving the scene. Camera object. Location of objects on a 3d scene.

Laboratory

work 1

2. Textures, mate-

rials and elements

of the scene

3 Adding new textures to the project. Creation and use of materials.

Shaders and their use. Work with aggregated characters and their com-

ponents. Creating a Terrain. Terrain Landscape Editor. Trees, grass

and surroundings. Placement of a player on Terrain.

Laboratory

work 2

3. Scripts and ob-

ject movement

3 Install Visual Studio Plug-in for Unity3d. Creating scripts. Apply a

script to an object on the stage. The structure of the automatically

generated script. Creating a character movement using a script.

Laboratory

work 3

4. Player man-

agement

3 Using the Asset store. Download unitypackage. Use ready-made uni-

typackage. Creating unitypackage. The structure of projects created

by other developers. Use of ready-made asset. Character Controller

and its application. Move the object with the keyboard. Dynamic ob-

ject creation.

Laboratory

work 4

5. User interface 3 User interface and its application. Examples of basic controls. Bind-

ings and orientation of controls relative to the working area of the

screen. Creating elementary events. Customize Canvas to different

screen resolution properties

Laboratory

work 5

6. Animation 3 Using ready-made character animations. Create your own animation.

Editing curves. Structure and main properties of the Animation com-

ponent. Animator component

Laboratory

work 6

Table 2: Course part 2. Game development based on Unity.

Topics Duration,

hours

Course materials Deliverables

1. Game Devel-

opment Basics

1 Game development life-cycle. Game terminology. Overview of game

industry

Game Con-

cept plan

2. Creating a

character

3 Uploading models to the project. Features of creating game characters.

Customize avatars for models that use humanoid animations. Working

with the Animator component. Animator controller settings. Retarget-

ing of humanoid animated clips.

Characters

modelling

and anima-

tion

3. Finding a way 3 Creating a game scene. Navigation grid settings. Add and adjust ob-

stacles. Implementation of the movement of the character on the nav-

igation grid.

Group

projects

element

4. Inverse kine-

matics

5 Animation settings. Attaching skeletal parts to objects. Creating a

script to work with inverse kinematics. Fixation of skeleton points.

LineRender component.

Group

projects

element

5. Characters not

controlled by the

player

6 Creating a slider and stylizing it. Move the coordinates of the slider

to the position above the target. Creating goal health scripts. Using

Raycast.

Group

projects

element

6. Construction

of game levels

12 Creating a game level. Overlay post effects on the main camera. Set

up bots to search for enemies. Game level layout. Creating multiple

teams. Conﬁguration and error correction. Possibility of application

of scattering of bullets at shooting.

Final Game

Engine because it has a less steep learning curve than

Unreal. It can be used to develop games for any

platform, including the Web, for real games, not just

training games for learning. Unity scripting can be

done in C# or JavaScript, with which our students

have already had experience.

Using Unity to Teach Game Development

509

Table 3: Useful course element percentages, mean, and standard deviation.

Useful elements 1 2 3 4 5 M SD

The way in which the material was approached 0 5 40 32,5 22,5 3,73 0,88

The pace at which we worked 2,5 10 45 30 12,5 3,4 0,93

Working with peers inside and outside of class 0 7,5 22,5 42,5 27,5 3,9 0,9

Viber discussion group 2,5 7,5 32,5 40 17,5 3,63 0,95

Teamwork in labs 0 2,5 15 57,5 25 4,05 0,71

The presentation of the ﬁnal group project 0 10 20 45 25 3,85 0,92

The hands-on labs activities 0 5 25 32,5 37,5 4,03 0,92

Table 4: Student learning gains percentages, and mean.

Student gains from course 1 2 3 4 5 M SD

Understanding the main concepts in game development 0 5 25 42,5 27,5 3,93 0,86

Understanding the game development process 2,5 2,5 10 60 25 4,03 0,83

Understanding Unity Engine using in game development 0 5 15 37,5 42,5 4,18 0,87

Ability to think through a problems in game development 0 1 10 20 9 3,93 0,76

Conﬁdence in your ability to work in game development 0 5 25 47,5 22,5 3,88 0,82

Feeling comfortable with complex game development 0 2,5 35 45 17,5 3,78 0,77

4 ORGANIZATION OF THE

COURSE

We wanted to build the course in such a way that stu-

dents could learn the basics of Unity quickly enough

and focus on creating the game for most of the

semester.

After studying Paul E. Dickson’s works (Dickson,

2015; Dickson et al., 2017), our ﬁrst thought was to

build a course based on a book with examples that

could guide both us and our students, for example,

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials (Goldstone,

2009). One game is built throughout the book, each

chapter introduces a new concept and aspect of the

game. All examples of code are written in JavaScript

and C#. This book quickly gives an idea of colliders,

particle systems, etc. for anyone with no experience

in game development. The work on the book provides

enough information to study the basics of Unity.

One of the problems is the rapid development

of Unity and the need to ﬁnd relevant materials for

work. Unity has an active online community that

helps to ﬁnd textbooks to cope with the new features

and changes in Unity and could base the course on

one of the online textbook series. However, since the

duration of the course was only one semester, it was

necessary to develop a manual sufﬁcient to carry out

the laboratory tasks in order to use the books only as

an additional source of information.

Our goal in this course is to give students a sense

of the game development process with a focus on

project management, teamwork, and problem solv-

ing. The ﬁrst part of the course focuses on teaching

students to use Unity, and the second part focuses on

developing real play by groups of students. Classes

were held for 3 hours per week: 1 hour of lectures

and 2 hours of laboratory work. The basic structure

of the course is shown in table 1, 2.

The method that we used in the ﬁrst part of the

course, to organize the study of Unity students, was

to combine work on the assignments in the classroom

with the performance of additional creative tasks by

ourselves. In each work, students had to understand

in detail what had been done in the classroom in order

to determine how to complete the extra assignment.

During the ﬁrst part of the semester, students sought

to learn how to solve various problems with Unity be-

fore they began working on their ﬁnal game projects

that required these skills. During this work, students

built a basic game in which the player could control

the movement and actions of the character in their en-

vironment.

5 RESULTS

It’s hard to measure success when students are build-

ing different games. By calling the game playable,

we mean that the students have created a mechanic

for the game (possibly with minor errors), combined

the art assets with the mechanics and made some in-

troduction (history, list of game items) that enters into

the game. In order to evaluate the results of our course

“Computer game development” we used some param-

eters offered by Ritzhaupt (Ritzhaupt, 2009) to evalu-

ate its such course.

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

510

Figure 2: RPG game.

Figure 3: Quest game.

Using Unity to Teach Game Development

511

Figure 4: Logical game.

Figure 5: Action game.

5.1 Usefulness of Course Elements for

Students

For studying the elements of the course that proved

successful, we asked the students to indicate which

elements of the course were useful for learning

in the range from 1 – “not useful” to 5 – “very

useful” (table 3). Of particular interest are the

highly rated elements: teamwork in labs (M = 4.05;

SD = 0.71), working with peers inside and outside

of class (M = 3.9; SD = 0.9), and the hands-on labs

activities (M = 4.03; SD = 0.92). These results un-

derline the importance of sufﬁcient work in the com-

puter laboratory and cooperative training in the game

development course.

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

512

5.2 Student Assessment of Gains

Students were asked to evaluate their post-graduate

achievements in a number of areas related to the de-

velopment of games on a scale of 1 to 5 (table 4).

The results showed that they made the most progress

in understanding the game’s development (M = 4.03;

SD = 0.83) and the ability to use the Unity Engine

(M = 4.18; SD = 0.87). In all other areas, progress

has also been above average.

5.3 Final Project Game

In the second part of the course, students worked in

groups (3–4) to create ﬁnal game projects. We allow

students to decide for themselves which games they

want to develop and how to split into groups. Each

group decided who would play what roles and what

they would need to do to ﬁnish the game. Lectures on

this part of the course covered a wide range of topics.

Some speciﬁc aspects of game development that stu-

dents are likely to need were discussed. All practical

tasks for this part of the course are related to keep-

ing students on their way to ﬁnishing the ﬁnal project

games. These include students presenting game ideas,

project plans, vertical slices, usability tests, a ﬁnal

game, and weekly reports on who has achieved what.

Most of the groups were able to successfully build

a playable game for the ﬁnal project, which is signif-

icantly better than the previous version of the course.

Students created RPG games (ﬁgure 2), quest games

(ﬁgure 3), logical games (ﬁgure 4) and action games

(ﬁgure 5). The variety of these games shows that stu-

dents are free to create games of their choice instead

of being limited to the genre and content given by the

teacher.

6 CONCLUSIONS

This version of the course made more progress than

the one based on the XNA Game Studio, even though

students had to learn to use Unity in a short time. The

fact that the game engine incorporates everything nec-

essary to connect the player, the art and the surround-

ings greatly inﬂuenced what students could achieve.

Although, in order to keep up-to-date with video

game development, it makes sense to focus on game

development rather than learning the tool, implemen-

tation in the form of a set of courses.

The video game development course can be based

on the Unity game engine, as it has a small en-

try threshold, free of charge for academic purposes,

a cross-platform, real game engine common in the

game development industry. Based on our experience,

Unity is a good option to teach a separate game de-

velopment course. Since Unity is easy to learn, stu-

dents can get it in less than half a semester, which

leaves more than half a semester to focus on any topic

you consider important (game design, project man-

agement, etc.).

Another result of this analysis is the effectiveness

of cooperative learning and teamwork strategies, es-

pecially in computer laboratories.

One of the most important conclusions we have

reached is that learning to design games requires a

change of perspective from the teacher-centred envi-

ronment in which the teacher dictates the learner’s

learning experience (e.g., leadership from outside

(King, 1993)). A learning environment in which stu-

dents have greater control over what they learn and

teachers serve as facilitators in this process.

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