Welcome back to the new year, and welcome to the Fall 2025 semester of 53-353 Understanding Game Engines, an IDeATe game design course offered by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. This course aims to demystify the process of programming and developing video games using a “game engine” – software that combines a framework of tools and applications and allows us to generate our own experiences on top of them. For this class, we will use the Unity game engine as our framework to constructs our games.
This course will meet regularly on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:00-12:50pm in Hunt Library, A4 Near. We will be using Unity 6 LTS as our required software for this semester. Please remember to bring your power supplies to class, as Unity will drain a laptop battery in no time!
Read more: IntroductionsCourse instruction will be delivered through a combination of live sessions for lecture and code reviews, and through a series of pre-recorded workshop videos so that students may “code-along” at their preferred pace. Course details, including the syllabus, assignments, and weekly outlines can be found on Canvas. This site will host written recaps of each week’s lesson, as well as code samples from the week’s lessons.