Week 4 — Sep 15 — Ex 3: Rules & States · One Sheet due

Exercise: Ex 3 — Rules & States. A goal trigger, a hazard, and a win/lose/restart loop.

Also due: the One Sheet (5 pts, Canvas) — title, hook, genre, platform, audience, core loop, art direction. Homework, not class time, but it's the direct written follow-up to Week 2's live pitch.

Feeds: directly into the Core Game Mechanic milestone next week (Wk 5), alongside Ex 2 — this is the second of the two paired exercises the syllabus names for that milestone.

Lecture topics, expanded

Colliders and triggers. The distinction that underlies everything from here on: a collider blocks physical movement, a trigger (Is Trigger checked) detects overlap without blocking it. Every goal, hazard, and checkpoint in the semester is a trigger, never a solid collider — worth stating as a rule of thumb, since the most common Ex 3 bug is a hazard that stops the player instead of damaging them.

GameStateManager and scene reload. The helper library's GameStateManager tracks Playing/Paused/Won/Lost as an explicit state rather than scattered booleans across scripts, and exposes a Restart that reloads the scene cleanly. This is the same component Week 11's Screen Layout milestone builds its entire menu flow on top of — today is the first, simplest version of a pattern that recurs for the rest of the semester.

Rules, goals, and win/lose states. The design content underneath the scripting: a goal without a visible failure condition isn't really a goal, and a hazard without a visible warning isn't a fair one. TriggerZone on the goal, Health or an instant-fail trigger on the hazard, wired to GameStateManager's Won/Lost states — three components, one coherent rules system.

Connecting it to the milestone

Between Ex 2's tuned verb and Ex 3's rules/state loop, a student now has everything the Core Game Mechanic milestone asks for: a playable build demonstrating the primary verb, inside a scene that can actually be won or lost. The lecture's job today is making sure that connection is explicit — some students will build Ex 3 as an isolated exercise and not realize it's meant to sit inside the same scene as Ex 2's verb until the milestone deadline is already on top of them.