Week 15 — Dec 1 — Game Build (critique)

Milestone: Game Build (25 pts) is due and critiqued live — the largest single deliverable of the semester, a published playable build with build notes. No new exercise.

Fed by: Ex 10 Test & Iterate (Wk 14). The build going out today should already reflect at least one playtest-driven fix, not just be a fresh export of whatever was in the editor last week.

Lecture topics, expanded

Build settings and platform targets. File → Build Settings, scene list order (Scene 0 must be the title/boot scene or the game opens on the wrong screen — a recurring last-minute panic), and choosing a target platform (Windows/Mac standalone is the default for this course; WebGL if a student wants a shareable browser link, with the caveat that WebGL has its own file-size and API limitations worth checking before committing this late).

Packaging and .unitypackage export. For students who want to share their project as source rather than just a build — Assets → Export Package — bundling scripts, prefabs, and scenes into one importable file. Useful for a portfolio submission that shows the project structure, not just the executable.

Publishing checklist. Build notes are graded alongside the build itself: known issues, controls, and what's intentionally out of scope all belong in a short README, because an evaluator (or the student's own future self) shouldn't have to guess whether a bug is a bug or a missed feature. This is also the moment to reiterate the syllabus's scope warning — a small finished game with honest build notes outscores an ambitious one that crashes on launch.

Connecting it to the critique

At 25 points, this is worth as much as every other milestone combined, so the critique should walk through the syllabus's implicit rubric in order: does it launch, does the core mechanic (Wk 5) still work, do all five screens (Wk 11) still gate correctly, does the level (Wk 8) still read as intentional. A build that regresses on an earlier milestone while adding new content is a scope-management lesson worth naming directly, not just a deduction.