Sunday, August 12, 2012

One year teaching Unity3D

About one year ago, I started to prepare Unity3D teaching materials. Everything started with the development of our first Unity3D game, SpinningTop Adventure, developed with Unity3D for iOS and Android.

With two very good students (Pau and Juan Carlos), SpinningTop Adventure gave me the chance of working again in the game development sector, an area I started with when I was a teenager, many years ago ;)

Thanks to the development of this game, I felt prepared to teach Unity3D, at least introductory courses. University CS students are maybe the perfect target for introducing Unity3D.

Game development is in a very good moment and students need special training in this area. The main advantage of Unity3D is that you can offer them the opportunity to create something in only an 8-hour course.

I was able to introduce the basics of Unity3D in only 8 hours in two courses I taught in the University of Applied Science of Lahti (Finland) and the Universitatea din Oradea (Rumania). It was really incredible to see their awesome outcomes in a so short course.



In Spain, I have had the chance of offering two Unity3D courses, one in our Campus of Alcoi of the Universitat Politècnica de València (40 hours) and another one, just a month ago, in our main Campus in Valencia (30 hours). By the way, the classroom I was teaching in Valencia was quite special for me, since the very last time I was there I was a student (yes, more than 20 years ago ;).

In both cases, the results have been really incredible, letting me to interact with very talented students with a lot of stamina ;)









This year I'll repeat the experience. It will try to offer Unity3D teaching again in Finland and Rumania, and of course in my own University here in Spain. Maybe I'll be able to include other European Universities we have agreements with.

I'm still in love with the processing project (http://processing.org) a book of which I have started last year (in Spanish, although I'm at the 40% of it).

However, I have to recognize, Unity3D is focusing almost all my time right now. As a matter of fact, I have decided to start writing an introductory book to Unity3D in Spanish using my current material. 

Anyway, the evolution of my teaching material depends on the time I'll have, taking into account that I'll be starting new games this September and a very promising project with a Norwegian University. 

So, after this deserved holidays I'm enjoying right now, new adventures with Unity3D are coming ;)

Friday, March 09, 2012

Unity3D and game development


Many months without writing anything, and one of the reasons is the amount of work we have had here lately.

I have been still working with new tools in order to work with computer graphics applications and games, and although I'm still in love with processing (my teaching material is still available), last year I was working with a new environment that has become my current love ;)

I'm talking about Unity3D.

Unity3D has a lot of incredible advantages when creating games and multimedia applications:
- It's framework is Mac and Windows and has an incredible environment to help us in producing outstanding games, multimedia and 3D contents
- Regarding developing, it is based on Mono project, which means many advantages: we can use either C#, Javascript or Boo, and we have a great collection of the .NET framework possibilities
- Develop once, distribute to iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and consoles. Really awesome.
- It has become the most popular game development engine, with thousands of developer and apps
- Scalable, well-documented, incredible ecosystem etc.

Why I am so excited ? Well, because as a matter of fact I was involved last year in the development of a game for iOS and Android. You can see it here in action and we developed it for the Swiss company x-fund ag. It is called SpinningTop Adventure and it is available in the AppStore and Android Market (or should I call it 'Google Play' now ?)

After developing a complete game and intensively using Unity3D, we are in a position to say that is really a very interesting choice, if not the best, when talking about games, multimedia and 3D systems, for mobile, desktop, web or console platforms.

Our current work ? Well, once covered our introduction to Unity3D we are working right now in applying this technology in the development of serious games, games for education and solutions for disabled people. I hope I'll be able to show you something soon.