Unity Carnival

January 2025

What is it?

The Unity Carnival is a workshop organized by the UChicago Game Design Club (UGD) to teach people how to use the Unity Game Engine. 

To teach the game engine, we follow the education philosophy where people cannot learn effectively without thinking for themselves and solving problems on their own. We found that most Unity tutorials are lacking in this regard as most tutorials are either videos that show people exactly what to do without requiring them to think for themselves or interactive walkthroughs that tell people exactly which buttons to hit and still do not require people to think for themselves.

To address these concerns, we created our own Unity tutorial which consists of over 100 pages of interactive challenges. All of these challenges are described in the document below. Our idea behind these challenges is that they will force people to figure out how to use the Unity engine on their own instead of telling them exactly which buttons to hit. We deliberately included many different topics and difficulties worth of challenges so that anyone will be able to find something of value in the challenges, regardless of prior experience with Unity. 

Each challenge has an associated ticket number between 1-5 based on the difficulty of the challenge (relative to the expected prior knowledge you should have before starting the challenge) and the amount of work it takes to complete the challenge. During the workshop, whenever someone completed a challenge, we gave them the associated number of carnival tickets. Then, we allowed participants to exchange their tickets for prizes including food, drinks, and 3D printed objects.

We ran this workshop with 27 students and it was a resounding success! We received so much positive feedback following this workshop that UGD considers it their most successful event of all time. As a concrete metric of this workshop's success, 10 workshop participants with no prior Unity experience before the Unity Carnival participated in the UGDxCareers 2025 Game Jam immediately after our workshop and managed to successfully create 3 Unity games. 12 workshop participants were also a part of the Devsign Track, our long-term game development education program, and, following the workshop, they were able to successfully develop their own Unity games as well.

Workshop Challenges

The 100+ pages worth of Unity challenges are described in the document below. To use this document, please make a copy and read through the Introduction page which explains how the document works.

Warning: We had a lot of trouble getting the project to open properly on Mac computers. We recommend completing these challenges on Windows. If you know of a better way of sharing individualized copies of a Unity project with arbitrary numbers of people, please let me know by emailing me at jserf02@gmail.com.