Add a movement script

Create a rotating collectible

Collect the collectible

Programming Essentials: More things to try

Mission 4 Quiz

Unity Essentials: Programming Essentials Quiz

Add code so that a player character can explore a living room and gather collectibles. 

In this Mission, you’ll program a simple interactive experience where you control a character in a living room scene and move around to collect objects. 

You'll be able to choose from a variety of characters and collectible objects. In our example, we'll use a robot vacuum that maneuvers to pick up dirt around the room.

Programming Essentials

Unity Essentials Pathway

Master the basics of Unity with the Unity Essentials Pathway. Perfect for beginners, this free learning journey introduces game development, 3D content creation, and Unity's core tools. Start building today!

Unity Essentials Pathway - Learn Game Development for Beginners | Unity Learn

Unity Essentials is the perfect place to start for beginners to Unity. No previous experience is necessary.

New to Unity? This guided learning Pathway includes everything you need to get started.

Designed for anyone new to Unity, this guided learning journey is your first step toward creating confidently in the Unity Editor and bringing your visions to life. In this learning Pathway, you’ll design different rooms of a house, learning the essentials of one key skillset as you complete each room.

Unity Essentials

Unity Essentials: Install Unity

Open the Unity Essentials project

Explore the Editor Interface

Master 3D scene navigation

Pass the Scene view flying test

Design a mural in the Scene view

Editor Essentials: More things to try

Unity Essentials: Editor Essentials Quiz

Explore a playground scene and design a mural to get comfortable with the Unity interface.

This tutorial series introduces you to the essential skills of navigating the Unity Editor.

You'll learn to navigate 3D space in a playground scene, using Flythrough mode and tools like Move and Rotate to design a mural.

Once you master these skills, you’ll have the foundation required for confidently creating in Unity.

Editor Essentials

Add furniture to the kid’s room

Make a bouncy ball

Make a tower of prefab blocks

Adjust the lights, background, and camera angle

3D Essentials: More things to try

Unity Essentials: 3D Essentials Quiz

Design a kid's bedroom with a bouncing ball and a tower of collapsing building blocks.

In this tutorial series, you'll explore Unity's capabilities by designing a kid's bedroom scene with dynamic elements like a bouncing ball and a tower of blocks. You'll learn new skills in 3D navigation, object customization, and using Unity's physics system. 

You’ll also create prefabs, adjust lighting, and capture your scene with a camera. 

This foundational knowledge is vital to creating any type of Unity project.

3D Essentials

Create an immersive soundscape

Audio Essentials: More things to try

Unity Essentials: Audio Essentials Quiz

Add immersive sound to a kitchen scene with a variety of different types of audio.

In this Audio Mission, you will learn the fundamentals of implementing different types of audio into Unity scenes. You’ll learn how to set the tone with background music, how to add realism with sound effects, and even how to implement spatial audio in a 3D scene.

Audio Essentials

Set up a 2D room

Complete your 2D Puzzle Game

Add an animated pet

2D Essentials: More things to try

Unity Essentials: 2D Essentials Quiz

Create a top-down minigame similar to the 3D living room experience, but in 2D.

In this 2D Mission, you'll create a top-down 2D version of the interactive living room scene you created earlier. 

Just like in the 3D scene, you'll control a character, and try to collect all the objects in a room. By completing this scene, you'll learn how working in 2D is similar to working in 3D, but also how it’s different.

2D Essentials

Build your portfolio project

Publish to WebGL

Challenge: Add a bonus scene

Capture a video of your project

Share your project

Combine all of your scenes together into one cohesive portfolio project that you can share with others. 

It's time to collect all your good work together into a singular portfolio piece that you and others can play!

A portfolio, especially in the realm of real-time 3D (RT3D) and game development, is not just a collection of work, but a practical way of demonstrating your familiarity with essential tools and concepts. 

In this Mission, you will package all of your work from this Pathway into a single playable experience that you can easily share with others.


Publishing Essentials

99e147d9-c97a-4ad5-ad2e-2d3eae02d1f2:d254fde5987f

Overview

Easy: Add a jump ability

Medium: Make the door open when the player approaches

Expert: Use generative AI to simulate sunrise and sunset 

Proceed to the next tutorial

4.C.2 - Easy - Add a jump ability.mp4

4.C.3 - Medium - Make the door open when the player approaches_U6_V2.mp4

4.C.4 - Expert - Use generative AI to add multi-camera toggling_U6_V2.mp4

Further develop your project and skills with optional challenges of varying difficulty.  

Games

Film

Automotive

Try these optional activities to challenge yourself, build your skills, and improve your project!

Each challenge is tagged as Easy, Medium, or Expert difficulty so that you know what to expect. You can do one of them, all of them, or none of them — it’s totally up to you!

Medium: Make the door open when the player approaches. 

Expert: Use generative AI to add multi-camera toggling. 

If you’re not interested in doing these challenges, skip to the end of this tutorial to mark it as complete.  

The ability for a player character to jump unlocks limitless additional gameplay possibilities and mechanics. 

In this extra challenge, you’ll give the player the ability to jump with just a few lines of code. 

This optional challenge is classified as Easy difficulty.


1.  Open the PlayerController script in your script editor. 

2.  Add the following variable declaration statement directly below your other speed and rotationSpeed variables toward the top of your script:

public float jumpForce = 5.0f;

After you save your script, this variable will be visible and editable in the Player Controller component. 

3.  Between the opening and closing curly brackets of the empty Update() function, add the following code:

if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump")) {
    rb.AddForce(Vector3.up * jumpForce, ForceMode.VelocityChange);
}

if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump")): Checks if the Jump button is pressed. Jump is configured in Unity's Input Manager to correspond to a key or button press. By default, the Jump action corresponds to the Spacebar.


rb: A reference to the GameObject's Rigidbody component, used to apply physics.


rb.AddForce(Vector3.up * jumpForce, ForceMode.VelocityChange): Applies an upward force to make the object jump. 

Vector3.up indicates the upward direction, and jumpForce sets the force magnitude.

ForceMode.VelocityChange changes velocity directly, making the jump instant.

4.  Save your script and return to Unity. Enter Play mode and press Spacebar to test the new jump. Adjust the Jump Force variable as you see fit. 

The player is currently trapped in the living room. It would open up so many possibilities if the player was able to open the doors and enter other rooms. You could even connect the living room with the kitchen and the kid’s room and allow the player to explore all three environments! 

To allow the player to open the door, you’ll need to add a new script that makes use of Unity’s Animator system. You may not have realized this, but you can actually create animations directly in Unity and then trigger those animations via scripts. 

The Door GameObject already has an Animator component with a Door_Open animation attached to it. You need to add the script that tells that animation to start when the player enters a trigger zone of the door. 

This optional challenge is classified as Medium difficulty. 


1.  Create a new script in the Unity Essentials > Scripts folder named “DoorOpener”. 

Important:  The name of this script must match exactly the name declared at the top of the class in the code snippet below (DoorOpener). 

2.  In the Scene view, select the door on the right side of the living room, then in the Hierarchy window, make sure you have selected the parent Door GameObject — and not the child DoorPanel or DoorHandle GameObjects. 

The parent GameObject is the one with the Animator component attached to it. 

3.  With the Door GameObject selected, select Add Component, then search for and add your new DoorOpener script. 

4.  Open the DoorOpener script in your script editor, delete all the default code inside it, and replace it by copying and pasting the code below into the empty script. 

Feel free to read through the code to see if you can understand it, with help from the comments. When you’re done, save your script and return to the Unity Editor. 

The script relies on the door having a trigger zone that detects when the player has entered it. 

5.  With the Door GameObject still selected, add a new Box Collider component, then enable the Is Trigger property.  

6.  In the Box Collider component, select Edit Collider then use the Scene view collider controls to set the size and position of the trigger zone. 

7.  Enter Play mode to test your game. 

When the player enters the trigger zone, the door should open! 

using UnityEngine;


public class DoorOpener : MonoBehaviour
{
   private Animator doorAnimator;


   void Start()
   {
       // Get the Animator component attached to the same GameObject as this script
       doorAnimator = GetComponent<Animator>();
   }


   private void OnTriggerEnter(Collider other)
   {
       // Check if the object entering the trigger is the player (or another specified object)
       if (other.CompareTag("Player")) // Make sure the player GameObject has the tag "Player"
       {
           if (doorAnimator != null)
           {
               // Trigger the Door_Open animation
               doorAnimator.SetTrigger("Door_Open");
           }
       }
   }
}

You’d be amazed at how much you can accomplish with the help of generative AI large language models (LLMs) like Unity Muse, ChatGPT, or Claude. These tools are especially helpful for generating relatively simple code. Unity Muse is trained and refined for Unity-specific questions, so it will probably give you the most reliable results, but other LLMs will work very well too. 

In this Expert-level challenge, you’ll use one of these tools to generate a script that slowly rotates the Directional Light, simulating a day-night cycle in your scene.

This optional challenge is classified as Expert difficulty. 


1.  Head over to your generative AI tool of choice and enter a prompt similar to the one below: 

“Create a script for Unity that I can add to my Directional Light that slowly rotates the light to simulate the day passing. The actual seconds for a day to pass should be a variable editable in the Inspector window.”

2.  In the script that is generated, locate the class declaration line at the top of the script that says, “public class [SCRIPT_NAME] : MonoBehaviour.” 

The [SCRIPT_NAME] is what you’ll need to name your script. The one generated for you will likely be different from the name of the script in the example!

3.  In the Project window, create a new script and give it the appropriate script name, then apply it to the Directional Light GameObject in your scene. 

Important:  The name of your script in the Project window and the name declared within the script in the class declaration (“public class [SCRIPT_NAME]”) must match exactly! Otherwise, your project will display an error in the console.

4.  Open the script and replace the default code with the AI-generated code. Save the script and return to the Editor. 

5.  In the Inspector window, there should be a new variable that allows you to control the time it takes for a full day to pass. Make the day pass quickly for testing purposes.

6.  Enter Play mode to test your new sun rotation functionality. 

If something doesn’t work, explain what is happening to the AI tool and see if the AI can troubleshoot the issue! 

No matter if you chose to tackle a single challenge, complete them all, or skip them, you're set for the next step. 


Proceed to the next tutorial, where you'll have a chance to complete a quiz and get credit for completing this project.

Programming Essentials: More things to try

1. Overview

2. Easy: Add a jump ability

3. Medium: Make the door open when the player approaches

4. Expert: Use generative AI to simulate sunrise and sunset

5. Proceed to the next tutorial

Complete this tutorial