Unity Workshop Recap
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By Erin Powers
Dozens of community members joined us last week for a weekend of exploration and tinkering with development software at Glitch’s first ever Introduction to Unity Workshop. Attendees brought their own laptops and programmed along with local experts to learn how to think like a game designer and create their own endless-runner style zombie game: Zombie Pogo Go.
Game Informer’s Tim Turi kicked off the workshop Friday night with a live reading of his own Zombie Pogo Go back story- a whimsical tale of a world that has been wrecked by two zombie apocalypses.
With only the help of his trusty pogo stick, our zombie hero must bravely traverse a world filled with obstacles and zombies looking to feast on, well, other zombies. From there, it was up to workshop participants to create the world, add in the zombies, and make this game come to life using Unity.
Attendees, including Game Informer editor Tim Turi (left) and Game Informer graphic designer Jason Pfitzer (right), hard at work during Friday’s session.
Ashley Godbold, game and application development instructor at the Minnesota School of Business-Richfield and founder of Mouse Potato Games, led everyone through the basics of Unity, including set-up and adding assets. Using some premade content just for the workshop, everyone combined animations, backgrounds and textures to create the game’s world and protagonist.
Ashley Godbold led the first day of the workshop by helping everyone get started with Unity.
After a dinner break, it was back to work as Ashley guided everyone through the scripting process, teaching everyone how to manage game controls and incorporate collectibles. By the end of the first day, everyone’s zombie could pogo, collect coins and bravely bounce through a spooky, endless forest.
The second day of the workshop helped everyone bring their games to life (er, undeath, it’s a Zombie game after all!) as Minneapolis game developer and co-founder of Graveck Interactive Matt Gravelle focused on the finer points of developing with Unity. Matt gave insight into adding the final touches with an in-depth look at animation and scripting, teaching everyone how to make their zombies explode using particle effects.
Matt Gravelle (right) giving some pointers to Glitch’s marketing strategist Tyler Grant (left). Matt led the second day of the workshop as he taught attendees how to add final touches to their games.
As they got more comfortable tinkering with Unity, attendees learned how to improvise and add personal touches to their own versions of Zombie Pogo Go. The workshop concluded as everyone showed off their hard work over lunch, experimented with their new Unity skills and, of course, had some friendly competitions to see who could get the high score.
We would like to give a shout-out to all of our amazing special guests who led the workshop, our dedicated volunteers who helped troubleshoot and teach, and everyone from the community who joined us to learn Unity. Glitch looks forward to offering more workshops and hopefully seeing everyone at future events!
