Unityversity Sundays at Santa Clara Library

Unityversity Sundays at Santa Clara Library [HISTORICAL] UPDATE: Unityversity class is no longer running at Santa Clara Library. When: [HISTORICAL, no longer happening] 1PM Sundays Where: at the Santa Clara Library, board room upstairs What we teach: How to make 3D and VR games and apps with Unity, VRTK and other game dev tools Prerequisites: No…

Basic Game Art

Basic game art production skills can be learned quickly in a few stages.   Materials & Textures Sources of free 3D assets Basic 3D modeling tools Materials & Textures When you make 3D game objects like cubes, they default to a white default material that blends together and is hard on the eyes. You can…

Shoot with raycasts

Raycasting is one of the most frequently used functions in Unity game development. Raycasting draws a line into space from an origin point until it hits something. It can be used not only to cast literal rays like for ray guns, but also it can be used to check for things being near each other…

Handling Input

At some point in your development journey, you may find yourself wanting to let players of your project utilize fancier input methods, rather than simply having them hit specific, default keys on their computer keyboard. TOOLS Unity does include some basic gamepad support; you can go to Edit->Project Settings->Input in the editor to map keys…

VRTK: Virtual Reality Toolkit 4

VRTK is a VR game development framework for the Unity game enigne that supports multiple VR SDKs and devices as well as simulation mode for working without headsets using keyboard and mouse support. Get VRTK and SteamVR from Github Do not download VRTK and SteamVR unity plugins from the Asset Store. Those are out of…

Scaling and Fitting a Screen Space UI for Multiple Orientations/ Resolutions

Check out this document on ui element positioning! https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-UIMultiResolution.html Screen space UI exists on/in the dimensions of the screen / viewport. Think of the screen as a glass window that you are seeing the world on the other side of. UI elements are attached to this window like decals and move with it. World space…

Hololens Unity Tutorial

Making mixed reality apps for Hololens with Unity takes a few steps: Follow the Microsoft Hololens Unity project creation tutorial. Unity development overview The fastest path to building a mixed reality app is with Unity. We recommend that you take time to explore the Unity tutorials. If you need assets, Unity has a comprehensive Asset…

Internet VARchive

Work in progress has begun to turn the Internet Archive 2017 Hackathon project into a working VR/AR experience for the anniversary event Oct 11. https://gitlab.com/unityversity/InternetVARchive Photogrammetry We are learning how to do photogrammetry to combine photographs into 3D scanned models. There are 2 very different kinds of photogrammetry: 3D scanning objects and indoor mapping architectural…

Cogswell Bootcamp

BOOTCAMP CURRICULUM Week 1: Experimentation Week 2: Concept Week 3: Design Week 4: Features Week 5: Content Week 6: Playtesting Week 7: Polish Week 8: Prelaunch Demo Night

Gameplay Progression

Gameplay progression is the change in a game’s dynamics over time to keep the game interesting and difficult as the player increases in skill to reward continued play. Develop a progression for your game Develop a gameplay progression plan to expand your gameplay features into a series of challenges that increasingly explore the possibilities of…

Make a text console game

Text console games are simpler than graphical ones and help you to learn fundamental C# programming concepts like data structures. Create a text-only game using the Debug.Log console The simplest possible game we can make in Unity is one that uses Debug console output and single keys as input. Make a new scene. Copy the…

Unityversity Bootcamp2 Playtest night at GDC2017

Unityversity participated in a night of playtesting student-created games in an annual tradition begun by Ian Schreiber of RIT in 2015. We exhibited work-in-progress prototypes from the Gamebridge Bootcamp and played many games by RIT students. You can see some of our games on screens around 1:27 into RIT’s video: Here are some pictures of…

Shoot a projectile with Instantiate

The Shoot a projectile tutorial teaches you how to press a button to Instantiate a prefab game object projectile and apply physics forces to it to to trigger a script on impact. Instantiating objects and shooting projectiles are two of the most commonly used concepts in game development. To shoot a projectile, use this script…

Fungus Trigger

Fungus Trigger allows you to place triggers in a 2D or 3D game world that trigger Fungus dialogue to appear and that transition control back to the game when dialogue ends. Set up the project Create a new empty project. In Window / Asset Store. Search for Fungus. Download and import Fungus. Make the FungusTrigger…

Dialogue Trigger

A dialogue trigger communicates messages to the player when they enter the area. Setup a project and scripts folder In Project, Create a new folder Name it _PROJECT and hit return Create a new folder inside _PROJECT Name it Scripts and hit return Create a script In Scripts, right-click and Create C# Script Name it…

VR green screen filming

VR is hard to show someone without putting them in a headset, so Valve opted to use green screens and external cameras tracked by Vive controllers and the recipe for filming this way is available. Guides to VR Green Screen Filming The makers of Fantastic Contraption are the popularizers of the technique and they shared their…

Unityversity Santa Clara Sundays at Hacker Dojo [HISTORIC]

UPDATE: This event is no longer running at Hacker Dojo. Gamebridge Unityversity Santa Clara Sundays were weekly every Sunday at Hacker Dojo from 12-6PM in addition to the long-running Gamebridge San Francisco. WHAT Free weekly game dev & VR classes for teens, all ages beginners and bootcampers WHEN Every Sunday from 12-6PM: 12-2 PM: For ages…

Unity improvements depend on our feedback

Unity has opened up their roadmap to make their plans for improvement transparent with a Feedback voting system for the features that matter most to us so it is every Unity developers’ duty to participate in making the Unity the engine we wish it to be. Unity developers should not settle for putting up with problems…

Chatbot AIs in Unity with AIML and SpiritAI

Chatbot AIs are conversational programs that respond to typed text input and you can put chatbot AIs into Unity games and experiences to play the role of characters with more than the usual menu-based dialogue choices. Chatbot AI systems Alicebot AIML SpiritAI PullString GDC UPDATE: SpiritAI exhibited an emotionally intelligent chatbot middleware called Character Engine at…

Making a strategy game

Strategy games get to the essence of game design by being all about giving players interesting choices to plan and implement. Implementing strategy games Turn-based strategy games Turn-based Strategy Framework This open-source free package lets you get started making a grid-based map with hex or square tiles and terrain and units that move across it….

VR desktop computer buying guide

Virtual reality is demanding and requires a desktop of at least $600 and high-end VR requires highly upgradable and overclockable desktops that can do SLI in the future. If you are doing VR development, you will need a VR-ready laptop, a laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 EGPU and a desktop GTX 1080 in it, or…

MacBook Pro 2016 with a Thunderbolt 3 EGPU

There is finally a good guide to the setup steps required to get Thunderbolt 3 EGPUs working on different MacBook Pro 2016 machines. You lost about 10% of the maximum performance, but a 980 Ti for example in a Bizon 2 enclosure will give you macOS-compatible VR capability beyond the 460 in the top 2016…

Mnemonics

Mnemonics are learning and memorization techniques that can help you learn and remember what you learn better. Human memory is perfectible Human memory is normally fallible but there are people who do are born with the ability to not forget things and there are people who practice mnemonic techniques to deliberately not forget things without…

Articy Draft

We’ve explained why you should use Articy Draft in our overview of writing and design tools.  Let’s learn how. We’ll cover: detail on beginner quick start tutorial what kinds of intermediate integration you can do with Unity Dialogue System Importing into Unity what kinds of advanced workflows are possible Variables & Lua scripting Entity database design…

Hack the Future 18

Hack the Future 18 April 1st at South San Francisco Public Library WHAT: An all-day hackathon for young future hackers where you choose what you want to learn about and work on from activity stations like robots, Unity games, minecraft mods, 3D printed models, electronic circuits, and more! WHEN: Saturday April 1st, 2017   10:00am – 5:00pm WHERE:…

Virtual Reality Development

Virtual reality development puts us inside the game world with presence, the sense that we are really there. How do you learn VR development? You can develop VR experiences most easily with Unity. Desktop VR You can get started with desktop VR if you already have a VR headset like HTC Vive or Oculus Rift….

VRBridge

VRBridge is the virtual and augmented reality learning group of Gamebridge Unityversity Noisebridge Hackerspace. WHAT: VRBridge is the Noisebridge virtual and augmented reality learning group and is part of the Gamebridge game development group. We communicate on Noisebridge Slack on #vr. We have an HTC Vive VR headset and a number of Google Cardboard headsets…

Game Audio Design

Game audio design is the creation of sound effects and music to give games emotional impact. Music making Music gives an experience emotion. Music composition for games adds additional dimensions of interactivity that normal linear music doesn’t have. How important is music? Imagine Star Wars without music. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it: Sound…

Game Artistry

Game artistry makes you a wizard who can paint universes into existence. Making game art is one of the core game development skill specializations. We have a basic game art tutorial to get you started. There are a number of art subskills to be learned: Concept art Drawing Environment drawing: Fleshing out level designs into…

Web Development

Web development makes you a wizard that can create apps that change the world. Learning HTML Learning to make web pages with HTML is a great step towards learning programming. Do the Khan Academy HTML/CSS course. Learning front-end Javascript Once you understand HTML, Javsascript is the next step to make interactive experiences on web pages. Do the Khan Academy…