Using Unity to Teach Game Development

Video games are ubiquitous and our students want to learn how to make them. As computer science professors we see incorporating games into our curricula as a great way of increasing student excitement, increasing retention, and teaching communication skills. The problem many of us face though is how to teach game development when you have never written a game. Searches of articles and course offerings from other colleges does not provide a lot of clarification on what is the best environment for teaching such a course. The solution that we have found after many attempts is to build a game development course around the Unity game engine, and in this paper we describe how we arrived at this decision. Unity is easy to learn, free, cross-platform, a real game engine, and known in the field of game development but not discussed in computer science literature with regard to this type of course.