Welcome to 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.
For the 2024 Summer 1 offering, this course is offered remotely, and can be completed in either a synchronous or asynchronous fashion. Live sessions will be held each day from 12:30-1:50pm (Pittsburgh time) via Zoom, and recordings of those sessions will be posted later each day. Classes will feature a mix of topic discussions as well as “code-along” workshops that advance our project each week. Students can use these recordings to take the class outside of the normal schedule, or to review the work performed in the class.
This site will feature written summaries of lessons, as well as sample code from the workshops. We will also use Canvas for assignments and announcements, and Box for assignment submissions.
During this semester, we will use the Unity 6 Preview version, which has just recently been released. The first class will cover how to install and configure the game engine on your machine. A word of caution if you are working on a laptop – you will want to have your power supply handy, as game engines often use a LOT of power and will quickly drain a battery!