The Stages of Game Development

Planning your project

CRC Cards

Your First Milestone: Vertical Slice

In this project you will learn how to keep a sense of the big picture by dividing the game development process into stages and milestones, hit your first major milestone in the development of a game through creating a vertical slice, and learn two planning tools you can use to plot a course to a finished game. 

Milestones

Course Introduction and Planning

Game Jams and Skilling Up

Set your goals and find your community

What is the Design Process? 

Scope

Constraints and Our Theme

Concentric Design

Why Prototype? 

Assets shouldn't be liabilities

Why Agile?

Vertical Slice - Part Two

Refactoring

Sprint Planning

Alpha Build

What is Playtesting?

How To Playtest

Sprint Plan

Review and Redesign

How to Release your Game

Alpha and Beyond

Bonus Content

In this project you will learn about what's ahead for you on your journey to finishing a game! You'll also get a chance to confirm that you have the right knowledge and skills to get the most out of the course, along with links to useful resources that will help you on your way. You will also learn how to equip yourself for your journey, and meet some of your fellow adventurers.

Goal Setting and Community Building

In this project you will learn about using a design process to take your idea from a broad concept into a finished, polished game, the concept of scope will help you achieve your goal of making a game, how constraints can help you create rules to keep you in scope,  and how to use the specific design process, concentric design.

The Design Process

In this project you will find out if your game idea is fun through Prototyping. You will also learn how to make a plan for assets you will use in your game – the sounds, images, models, animations and other resources that make up a game – to avoid nasty surprises later in development. 

Prototyping

Agile Development

Professional teams schedule some time for code cleanup after each milestone so their code stays flexible and easy to work with. This project will give you some tips and general principles for this process, known as refactoring. With your vertical slice done and your code in good shape, this is where you’ll start down the road to alpha.

Writing Better Code

Playtesting is more than just asking people if your game is fun. It's a structured process for collecting useful information about specific parts of your design. In this project you will learn why Playtesting helps you collect useful information on your design and how to execute the entire process. 

Playtesting

In this project you will learn how to release your game, what the next steps are after game release, and additional tips for getting to the end. 

Release your game

Lots of people start games, but it’s surprisingly hard to finish one. This course guides you through the process used by professional game makers to develop their ideas, keep their projects on track and deliver a complete, released game. 

Explore the Unity Asset Store for game toolkits and template assets that will help you quickly design and prototype your games. These resources can accelerate your development process and help you achieve your goal of releasing a polished game!

Design and Publish Your Original Game: Unity USC Games Unlocked

399951fe-1ee3-51da-858c-331ba8d46d3d:7vYczsks3hAToeFfF8b44Y

Managing Scope

What are CRC Cards?

Assignment: CRC Cards

player, heart rate (representing HP), interactive objects (maybe I should split this class for three others?)

LV 1 

raulsanchezmicheas

Made some cards with the classes that at this point come to mind

Tarjetas sobre El equilibrista

Agustin Dominguez

Classes and relations based on the playable prototype.

CRC cards

unity_ABBB8FB9151B27AEEBC3

i wanna de@d i'm bad in all help me 

safasfafsagj

three example classes

adaa96

This is my initial crc cards setup. I'll take some time on enemy AI using state machine and adding to crc cards collection later on.

CursedBackpack CRC cards

CatshitOne

Strategy Combat CRC Cards

Arcane_Creator

Onur Kucukoz

Managing Scope.mp4

A useful tool that will help you design your game in an object oriented system are CRC Cards.

Unity + USC Games Unlocked

Games

CRC cards are literal, physical 3”x5” (or 8cm x 13cm) index cards. Each one shows three things: 

On each card, write the name of a C# class you plan to create for your game. Under that, describe what the class does. Be reasonably specific. If you can’t fit all the responsibilities onto the card, your class may be trying to do too much and you should consider splitting it up. 

Next you’ll think about what other classes this one might need to talk to – its collaborators. Write the names of those classes at the bottom of the card. (If there are two classes that need to talk to each other, write it down on both cards.) 

When you’ve created your cards, group them so that collaborators are near each other. Imagine a sequence in your game, e.g. the player defeats the final enemy in a wave or picks up a power-up. Trace through all the things your code needs to do in response and make sure that each step is represented on your cards. Try this with another sequence or two. 

You will be tempted to just do this in a Google Doc, or by drawing a grid in a notebook, instead of digging up index cards. But one of the ways this exercise helps you is that it lets you physically group cards together and rearrange them as you think about them working together. This spatial organization allows you to create a mental picture of your code that will help you keep things clear and separate in your mind for the rest of the project. 

If you’ve never tried to plan code before, you might feel intimidated by this assignment. The most important thing about planning your code is just that you do it. You’ll get better at it as you gain experience. 

To get started, look at your concept document and the drawing you made of gameplay. Look at each item on the screen and think about what it needs to do. 

For example, the tower in a tower-defense game needs to track enemies that are nearby and fire at them. The player character in a platformer needs to run and jump. They might also need to keep track of health, or pick up and fire weapons. That’s starting to sound complicated, so you might split the responsibilities into PlayerMovement, PlayerHealth, and PlayerWeapons. 

If there’s more than one of something on the screen, think about how they will get there – will you hand-place them or spawn them from code? Either way, when you have more than one of something think about whether you need another class to manage them. 

Finally, think about how things change as the player plays the game – for example, when the player eats a power pellet, or when all the enemies have been cleared from a level. What class will keep track of this information? What class(es) will respond to the change? 

In this assignment you’re going to use a tool called CRC cards to think through how you will set up your code. This process usually doesn’t take more than half an hour for a small game.

Thinking through how you set up your code has two powerful benefits:

A little planning is guaranteed to save you a lot of debugging.

As you think through how to set up your code you’ll get a sense of how much work you need to do, so you can check whether your scope is realistic.

Make the cards using the instructions above.

Take pictures of your cards and upload them to the submission gallery and provide some description.

After you submit, we give feedback, via comments in the Gallery, to at least 2 fellow course participants.

CRC Cards

1. Managing Scope

2. What are CRC Cards?

3. Assignment: CRC Cards

Your submission preview

Complete this Exercise