Week 3 — Sep 8 — Ex 2: The Verb

Exercise: Ex 2 — The Verb. One core mechanic — jump, dash, grab, shoot, or swap — tuned to feel right. This is each student's first work in their own project rather than a shared starter scene.

Feeds: directly into the Core Game Mechanic milestone (Wk 5), alongside Ex 3 next week — the syllabus pairs these two exercises explicitly as the milestone's two inputs.

Lecture topics, expanded

GameObjects, components, and prefabs. The core Unity vocabulary: a GameObject is a container, components give it behavior, and a prefab is a saved template so changes propagate to every instance. Worth demonstrating live — edit a prefab, watch every placed instance in the scene update — since this is the single idea that makes the rest of the semester's "build once, reuse everywhere" pattern make sense.

PlayerMove2D and the Input System. Wiring Week 1's Input Actions asset to the helper library's PlayerMove2D — the exposed tuning fields (move speed, jump force, dash distance) are students' first hands-on Inspector tuning, a preview of Week 5's lecture on the same topic. Whichever verb a student picks, PlayerMove2D is almost certainly the starting point or the thing it gets bolted onto.

Isolating one core verb. The actual design skill: picking one verb and making it feel good before adding anything else. A student who tries to prototype jump-and-dash-and-shoot simultaneously this week usually ends up with three undertuned mechanics instead of one good one — worth naming directly, since ambition here often comes from enthusiasm rather than misunderstanding the assignment.

Connecting it to the milestone

Ex 2's tuned verb, plus Ex 3's rules and win/lose loop next week, are the two things the Core Game Mechanic milestone actually grades. A student who nails Ex 2 but skips real tuning (default values left untouched) will hit exactly the Week 5 lecture's warning sign — a value never touched from its Inspector default — so it's worth flagging today that "it moves" and "it feels right" are different bars, and only the second one is what next week's exercise and the milestone after it actually reward.