GD Materials

This class traditionally teaches game design using the industry standard software Unity. Unity, though, will not run on the Chromebooks. It requires a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine to run. If you only have a Chromebook, we will use Scratch to create games. Scratch is free and will run through a web browser on the Chromebooks. You only need to visit the site to run it.

Unity, though, is not the easiest software to install and work with. It is constantly updating and is often not backwards compatible. Also, games created in one version may not run in another version. Because of this, it is not uncommon to have multiple versions of Unity running on a single machine. So, you actually don’t install and run the Unity software directly. You actually install software called Unity Hub first. Unity Hub will then download and manage the different versions of Unity that are installed. Unity Hub will also keep track of you projects, which versions they were created in, and helps keep track of all the version changes. When you want to open a project, you run Unity Hub, not Unity. Unity Hub will then open the project with the correct version on Unity. This is a little confusing at first, but you will get used to it. Unity also requires you to install a C# editing program to edit code, separate from Unity Hub and Unity. Unity wants you to install Microsoft Visual Studio as the C# editing program, but you can use any C# editor. 

In short, here is what you need to do to get Unity to fully run.

1. Download and install Unity Hub. 
2. From inside Unity Hub, download and install the latest version on Unity from the Installs tab.
3. If Microsoft Visual Studio does not install automatically with Unity, download and install it as well.