Though creating makes me happy, I equally want to enable others to do so. I believe it is everyone’s responsibility to give back and share their knowledge, especially towards the ones that are at the beginning of their career, or somehow less privileged. I always hold dear the moments where I can be a mentor or a teacher. This is why I have been taking part as a volunteer in Coderdojo, Coding Pirates, and other beginner or young-oriented initiatives.

These experiences inspired me to come up with the Unity Playground, a framework that I designed to ease the barrier of entry into Unity for the very beginners. At its core, the Playground is a big collection of simple-to-use components that can be combined to obtain quite a good range of gameplay. It also includes a huge library of sprites (made by Unity animator Stefano Guglielmana) that allow for a variety of scenery and characters.

I developed the Playground in my spare time for a year, until it was adopted by Unity and made an official resource, now maintained by the in-house Learn team. Here’s the launch trailer, narrated by me:

What’s in it

The Playground comes with standard Unity components without any type of new tool or UX on top. For this reason, it is a natural way to introduce someone to Unity and then gently push them into writing their own code. Potentially they can combine their code with Playground components, since all Playground scripts just rely on physical forces. Injecting one’s own behaviours should be easier even for a beginner developer, just AddForce 🙂

The Playground contains 5 sample mini games: a bare-bones Adventure game, a Defender-style game, a 2-player Football, a Lunar Lander, a Maze, and a Roguelike with dialogues and items.

Since the Playground is so open-ended and not a step-by-step tutorial, I suggest to use it under the supervision of a mentor who knows Unity well.

The Playground is available on the Unity Asset Store, and its code is also on Github.