Week 1 — Aug 25 — Ex 1: First Playable

Exercise: Ex 1 — First Playable. A sprite on screen that moves with keyboard and gamepad via the Input System. No project of their own yet — this is a shared starter scene.

Purpose: the ten minutes that prevent the semester's most common silent failures, per Guide 0's framing — this week is about tooling fluency, not design content.

Lecture topics, expanded

Editor tour and project setup. The Unity Hub, creating a 2D project from the right template, and the panel layout (Scene, Game, Hierarchy, Inspector, Project) that every later lecture assumes students already navigate without thinking. Also Guide 0's GAME1303 → Setup Project and Verify Setup menu items, so the shared helper library is confirmed working before anyone builds on top of it.

Sprite/asset import pipeline. Import settings that matter immediately: Pixels Per Unit, Filter Mode (Point for pixel art, Bilinear for hand-painted), and Sprite Mode (Single vs Multiple for spritesheets). An asset imported with the wrong PPU is the first-week bug that looks like a physics problem later.

Input System package and control schemes. Installing the New Input System package, creating an Input Actions asset, and binding one action (Move) to both keyboard and gamepad. The concept worth landing today: an action is a named intent ("Move"), not a specific key — everything later in the semester reads actions, never raw key codes.

Connecting it forward

There's no milestone or graded exercise dependency yet, but Ex 1's Input Actions asset and PlayerMove2D script are literally what Ex 2 extends next-next week — get the control scheme right today and Week 3 is a small addition; get it wrong and Week 3 starts with debugging Week 1's setup instead of building on it.