Set your goals and find your community

In the comments section, share a little bit about yourself and your goals, so you can meet your fellow adventurers. The pinned post is the Course Welcome post - share some or all of the following with your fellow learners:

• Tell us your time zone (for example, Pacific or Central European).
• Tell us your goal for the course and for your game. For example:
  • I want to release my first game on itch.io in 2019.
  • I want to make a game for my sister for her birthday.
  • I want to finish a game in a genre I haven’t tried before.
• Describe one challenge you’ll face on the way, like “I can only work on my project on weekends” or “I’m very new to code”.
• Also consider sharing your Twitch or Steam username, or other places your classmates might find you online.

Be as specific about the goal as you can, and phrase it so that you’ll be able to decide at the end of the course whether you really did it or not. Vague goals like “I just want to get better at Unity” won’t be very helpful to you.

Once you’ve introduced yourself, go read about your classmates. See if you can find people with a goal that’s similar to yours.

Be a good community member and check in – say something nice to them or ask them a question. You’re just being friendly, but it’s the beginning of building that creative community we talked about in the videos. We highly recommend commenting on at least 2 other course members' post.

Yes, your homework is to play games!! Find and play small, well designed games to help you come up with your own. Specifically, find fun, small games to give you some inspiration for the game you’ll make in this course. Don’t get too attached to any specific game though – you’ll get the theme next week and you want to leave your options open.

Start with games that were made for game jams, such as Ludum Dare or the Global Game Jam. Itch.io and GameJolt also have a lot of good small games. Avoid games that combine story with game mechanics. That is, games like visual novels are okay, and games like endless runners are okay, but a platformer that also tells a detailed story (such as Braid) wouldn’t qualify.

Here are some other small games that will give you an idea of what to look for:

• Tomb of the Mask
• Helix Jump
• Bumper.io
• Rise Up
• Duet
• Threes!
• Push & Pop
• Drop 7
• Robot Unicorn Attack
• Circadia
• Ridiculous Fishing
• Thomas Was Alone
• Super Hexagon
• You Must Build a Boat
• Dots
• iO
• Osmos/Hundreds
• Penguin Launcher
• Kingdom: New Lands

After you've played the games discuss in the comments your favorites games, why do you like them, did playing them impact the kind of game you will create, or anything else you'd like to talk about.

These short articles and videos are packed with specific, practical tips for people making their first game. Spend some time with them to get yourself ready for your journey.

• This very short article, written by professional technical artist David Wehle, describes what he learned as he finished and released his first two solo games.
• Indie developer Chris Zukowski offers a reality check, and encouragement, for finishing your very first game. He also links to other excellent resources for beginning game makers.
• Unity asked popular YouTubers Extra Credits to offer specific, practical tips and resources for beginning game makers.
• Game Maker’s Toolkit, a YouTube series by Mark Brown, breaks down game design decisions in popular games – one of the best ways to learn what works. Watch a few to understand how to play games critically yourself.

In the next project we’ll get right into the good stuff.

You’ll learn about the design process – how professional game designers develop their ideas into game concepts. And we’ll introduce you to the biggest challenge of all for beginning game makers: scope.