1:1 Unity "Combat Focused" Game Design and Coding - Part 1
Learn Game Design and Game Coding with Unity by making a polished game from start to finish. No prior experience required. Rapid learning - project based class. Class meets once a week, is 1:1, and 90 minutes a session.
What's included
8 live meetings
12 in-class hoursHomework
1 hour per week. Every lesson has a (45 minute) optional homework assignment that reinforces what we learned and gives the students an opportunity to add more to their game between sessions. I highly encourage this, but it is not required to be successful in the course.Certificate of Completion
Certificate contains a list of all major game design and game skills learned. A great addition to your academic portfolio.Class Experience
Beginner - Intermediate Level
Learn the Art of Game Design and Game Coding with Unity, while making an awesome “Combat Focused” Zelda-like game from start to finish! 1-on-1 class, meeting once a week, for 90 minutes. A perfect course for anyone who wants to explore game design and game coding. This rapid learning, project based, course has us create a polished game in just 8 weeks. The levels are stunning, the enemies are plentiful, and the combat is smooth and super fun. Our goal is to learn a TON in a short time by rapidly completing a full game. I'll take you step by step through creating beautiful levels, lighting effects, combat and movement abilities, enemies, boss battles, and much more. We'll be coding everything from scratch, but no coding experience is required. I fully explain every line of code we'll write, and the optional homework for each lesson solidifies learning and encourages students to experiment with game elements and code alike. When you're done this class you'll be amazed by how much you learned and accomplished. Your finished game will be a permanent reminder of how to do everything we learned, and you'll be ready to continue creating games on your own. Special Note: I also offer a continuation to this class, "Unity "Combat Focused" Game Design Part 2", which continues right where Part 1 ends. A lot of advanced topics are covered as we evolve our game, enemies, and combat system considerably. Every Student Will Create: – Beautiful levels with gorgeous lightning and special effects – Modular coding scripts and interfaces – Destructible objects – Collectable items – 3 unique combat styles (Sword, Bow, Magic) – Multiple unique enemies, and their A.I. controllers – A multi-phase boss battle – Quests, NPCs, Level Transitions, and much more!
Learning Goals
Fundamentals of Unity and C#Level design - how to create beautiful levels with the help of layers, special effects, lighting effects, and post processing effects.
Syllabus
8 Lessons
over 8 WeeksLesson 1:
Creating Your Player
In this lesson we'll learn the basics of Unity and then dive straight into creating our player and programming our player's controls and movement.
Overview:
- Basics of Unity
- Intro to C# and Visual Studio
- Create your Player Character
* Player input controls
* Movement script
* Animate the player
* Collision & physics
* Player dash 90 mins online live lesson
Lesson 2:
Sword Combat Part 1
We'll start by learning how to use tilemaps to create beautiful levels. Once we have a nice level to run around in, we'll create and animate our sword attacks. Then we'll add nice visual effects and collision to our sword.
Overview:
- Intro to Tilemaps
* Creating a basic level
- Animate your sword
- Sword combat script
* Up and down swing combos
- Sword special effects
- Sword collision 90 mins online live lesson
Lesson 3:
Sword Combat Part 2
It's finally time to create our first enemy... a slime! This enemy will let us to practice attacking with our sword. It won't have any AI yet, but we will make it so our sword deals damage, knocks it backwards, and makes it flash when it gets hit.
Overview:
- Create our first enemy
* No AI yet, just sword practice
- Enemy state machine script
- Enemy health script
- Intro to modular coding
* Knockback script
* White flash when hit script
- Enemy (slime) death special effect 90 mins online live lesson
Lesson 4:
Beautiful Levels and Lighting
In this lesson we'll make our level absolutely beautiful. We'll create special tiles for quickly building levels and for animating parts of our level's background. We'll also use lighting effects to create game atmosphere and glow effects.
Overview:
- Cinemachine Camera
- Advanced tilemap
* tilemap layers
* Rule tiles
* Animated tiles
* Parallax tiles
- Walking behind objects
- Destructible objects
- Lights and Bloom Effects
* Global lighting
* Glow effects
* Torch 90 mins online live lesson
Other Details
Parental Guidance
- You will need to download and install:
* UnityHub (to get Unity)
* Visual Studio Code
- Students must ensure both are installed and that Unity can launch "before" our first class.
- This course focuses on designing a combat system for fun action packed gameplay, and by necessity this course involves cartoon violence in the form of (Sword, Bow, and Magic) combat.
* However I never allow realistic blood, firearms, or anything else that leaves the realm of fantasy gameplay.
Pre-Requisites
No prior knowledge required, but students with some Unity and/or coding background will still find this course very rewarding! We create a stunning game from start to finish while learning a ton of game design and game coding.
Supply List
For this course, students will use the UNITY Game Engine. To install the Unity Game Engine you must first install Unity Hub: https://unity.com/download - After installing Unity Hub, sign in with Google and/or create a unique Unity ID. - On the left hand side of Unity Hub you will see an option that says "Installs". - Click on the installs tab and then click the blue "Add" button on the top right corner. - Click the “Install Editor” button for the latest 2022 release (right now it's 2022.3.54). * Do not install Unity 6 (we won't be using that). Unity runs on most Windows, Mac and Linux machines but the better your video card (GPU) and the more RAM you have (8GB bare minimum) the better the experience. * Please install the UNITY Engine PRIOR to class starting. URLs for primary software used in this class: - Unity - https://unity.com/download - Visual Studio Code - https://code.visualstudio.com/download
External Resources
In addition to the Outschool classroom, this class uses:
Joined January, 2025
Teacher expertise and credentials
I've been teaching and developing curriculum for STEM classes for over 10 years. I got my start with iD Tech Camps where I designed over a dozen courses in: Programming, Game Design, and Robotics. Since then I've created over 30 more classes primarily in Programming and Game Design for various summer camps and universities.
I've developed and published several of my own games with Unity, and I'm currently working on two game development teams one of which will be publishing our new game "Last Light" on Steam in Q4 of 2025.
Fun side note: I developed this class when I was creating the original proof of concept for the game "Last Light", and the story concept was actually pitched to me by one of my previous students.Reviews
Live Private Course
$60
weekly1x per week, 8 weeks
90 min
Live video meetings
Ages: 11-17
