GAME 1303 — Student Setup Guides: Table of Contents & Build Order

Seventeen per-student guides plus a shared foundation document, ordered so each one builds on what came before.

The ordering principle

Pure difficulty ranking isn't quite the right order, for one reason: eleven of the seventeen games use the same player prefab. If the simplest game is written first and it happens to be one that doesn't use that prefab, every later guide has to re-explain it. So the order below is difficulty-ranked with one adjustment — the first platformer guide comes early and does the heavy lifting for the rest.

Everything after Guide 0 and Guide 1 can say "build the player as in Guide 1" instead of repeating forty lines of component setup. That's the difference between seventeen guides and seventeen copies of the same guide.

How difficulty was measured

Not by script count alone. Each game was scored on required scripts, prefabs to build, ScriptableObject assets to author, UI wiring burden, unfamiliar Unity subsystems (URP, NavMesh, 3D, blend trees), and manual UnityEvent connections — with UI and novelty weighted heaviest, because those are where students actually get stuck.

Table of Contents

Foundation

Guide 0 — Before You Start · everyone, 20 minutes
Guide00_BeforeYouStart
Import the package, run GAME1303 → Setup Project, run Verify Setup, confirm the Input Actions. What the tags and layers are for. What a ScriptableObject is versus a component. How to read a UnityEvent in the Inspector. No game-building — this is the ten minutes that prevents the most common silent failures.

Part One — Foundation Builds

These three establish the patterns everything else reuses.

Guide 1 — Conquer the Cutthroat Course · Nicholas Murley
Guide01_CutthroatCourse_Nicholas
20 scripts · 6 prefabs · 0 ScriptableObjects · complexity 35
The reference build. Pure Tier 1 + Tier 4, no enemies, no collectibles, no dialogue. Builds the standard player prefab, the respawn/checkpoint loop, and six hazard types. Every later platformer guide references this one for the player. Nicholas gets a complete game; everyone else gets the template.

Guide 2 — Weenie(dog) Maze · Jax Keenan
Guide02_WeenieMaze_Jax
12 scripts · 3 prefabs · 1 SO · complexity 27
The smallest complete game in the class. Proves the kit works outside platformers: grid movement, the snake body queue, treat spawning, and a maze typed as text rather than drawn. Static camera, no physics tuning.

Guide 3 — Hot Air · Julian Vargas
Guide03_HotAir_Julian
17 scripts · 4 prefabs · 0 SOs · complexity 33
First variation on the player: BalloonController replaces PlayerController2D entirely, while checkpoints, health and hazards carry over unchanged. Teaches that the kit is modular. Fuel, wind zones, and the grappling hook.

Part Two — Adding Combat & Systems

Each introduces one new subsystem on top of the reference build.

Guide 4 — Missile Man! · Zachary Thompson
Guide04_MissileMan_Zachary
21 scripts · 5 prefabs · complexity 39
First combat: hitboxes, hurtboxes, the Physics 2D layer matrix. Plus MomentumLauncher and a charge meter — a signature mechanic that's mostly Inspector tuning.

Guide 5 — Last Delivery · Chris Acosta
Guide05_LastDelivery_Chris
21 scripts · 6 prefabs · 1 SO · complexity 41
Second movement rig: TopDownMover. The delivery loop (cargo as the resource, not health), lane traffic, and chasing enemies. First game where the design question — what does failure mean? — is part of the setup.

Guide 6 — Cozy Critters · Rhys Watson
Guide06_CozyCritters_Rhys
14 scripts · 3 prefabs · 2 SOs · complexity 34
Third rig, and the first with no player character at all. Need stats, a wandering pet brain, care buttons, personality drift, and the save system with offline decay. Light on scripts, heavy on UI wiring.

Guide 7 — The Magnet · Amarion Wilson
Guide07_TheMagnet_Amarion
25 scripts · 6 prefabs · complexity 45
Full enemy setup plus a boss with phases. MagnetPull and metal objects. Amarion already has sprites, so this guide can be art-forward.

Guide 8 — Stardust · Marcelo Diaz
Guide08_Stardust_Marcelo
27 scripts · 6 prefabs · complexity 51
The complete combat stack: melee, projectiles, combo counter, dash, wall-slide. The most "standard action game" build, and the best one to read if a student wants to see everything combat can do.

Part Three — Content Systems

Where the work shifts from components to authored assets.

Guide 9 — Commission Witch · Sylvia Lee
Guide09_CommissionWitch_Sylvia
26 scripts · 5 prefabs · 4 SOs · complexity 48
The collect → gate → resolve chain: ItemTypes, doors that require counts, recipes with forbidden ingredients, and three endings selected by what you gathered. First guide where most of the work is authoring assets rather than placing objects.

Guide 10 — Anabasis · Andraya Rhoads
Guide10_Anabasis_Andraya
20 scripts · 4 prefabs · 5 SOs · complexity 43
The dialogue UI build. Constructing the dialogue panel is the single biggest UI job in the kit — budget a full session. Also flags, branching choices, world-state swapping, and multiple endings. Every later narrative guide references this one for the panel.

Guide 11 — MythoClash · Fozaan Sheikh
Guide11_MythoClash_Fozaan
28 scripts · 4 prefabs · 6 SOs · complexity 57
Monster roster as ScriptableObjects, the fight/skip encounter loop with weighted difficulty, and the Drachma wallet. A fight/skip UI plus a threat readout.

Guide 12 — Roach Invasion · Joshua Freeman
Guide12_RoachInvasion_Joshua
28 scripts · 6 prefabs · 5 SOs · complexity 61
Character swapping, with the per-insect health mode — which changes how death is wired (CharacterSwapper.OnCurrentCharacterDied instead of RespawnManager.OnPlayerDied). Four characters means four animator controllers with matching parameter names.

Guide 13 — A Spark of Corruption · Kathryn Groover
Guide13_SparkOfCorruption_Kathryn
33 scripts · 7 prefabs · 4 SOs · complexity 67
Character swapping and the full combat stack, four party members with different ability loadouts, four worlds. The largest 2D build. Kathryn's art is the most advanced in the class, so this guide can lean on it.

Part Four — Advanced Builds

Each requires a subsystem nobody else touches.

Guide 14 — Zap Attack!! · Tony Williams
Guide14_ZapAttack_Tony
39 scripts · 8 prefabs · 14 SOs · complexity 82
The largest build by volume: four sectors, forty levels, a level-select menu, unlock currency, best-time saving, rail grinding, wall jumping. Hard because of scale, not novelty — steady grinding rather than new concepts. Scope conversation recommended before starting.

Guide 15 — Apep's Trial · Lazaro Garcia
Guide15_ApepsTrial_Lazaro
23 scripts · 5 prefabs · complexity 50
3D and 2D in one project: CharacterController and Rigidbody2D on the same object, three Cinemachine cameras, mode switching. Prototype on grey boxes before any art.

Guide 16 — Detective Liz: Haunted Case · Mena Rofail
Guide16_DetectiveLiz_Mena
32 scripts · 6 prefabs · 5 SOs · complexity 72
Requires URP with 2D lighting — a render pipeline change, not just a package. Flashlight with battery, darkness meter, light-sensitive ghosts, clue journal UI and dialogue UI, five floors in one scene. Two UI systems plus a pipeline.

Guide 17 — Store Simulator · Sanad Ammari
Guide17_StoreSimulator_Sanad
17 scripts · 6 prefabs · 4 SOs · complexity 55
Fully 3D, first-person, and requires a baked NavMesh — the one thing in this project where nothing works at all until a specific step is done. Carrying, shelving, customers, a register, and a day/economy cycle.

Appendix

Guide A — Cephalopods in Space! · instructor demo
GuideA_Cephalopods_Demo
7 scripts · 2 prefabs · complexity 18
The smallest complete game here. Good as an in-class live build — students can read the entire loop in five minutes and every field visibly changes how it feels.

Guide B — Shared Reference
GuideB_SharedReference
The player prefab, the enemy prefab, the standard scene managers, the twelve manual UnityEvent wirings, and the Animator parameter table. Extracted from the guides that introduce them so they can be linked rather than repeated.

Full ranking (computed)

Sorted by computed score; the Order column is the recommended writing order, which departs from raw score where teaching sequence matters.

Where the order departs from the score, and why:

• Cutthroat Course moves up (5th → 1st): it establishes the player prefab that eleven other guides need.
• Anabasis moves up (8th → 10th in a later part): it's the dialogue-UI reference, so it should land before MythoClash and Detective Liz, which both need that panel.
• Apep's Trial and Store Simulator move down despite mid-range scores: both require subsystems (3D hybrid, NavMesh) that no other guide touches, so nothing transfers either direction.
• Zap Attack sits before the three novel builds: it's the largest but conceptually familiar. Volume is easier to grind through than unfamiliarity.

Suggested per-guide structure

Consistency matters more than completeness here — a student who learns to read one guide can read any of them.

1. What you're building — one paragraph, plus the scope-warning if there is one
2. Before you start — which guides to have read, which packages beyond the defaults
3. Scripts you'll use — the checklist, grouped by tier
4. Assets to create — ScriptableObjects, with example values filled in
5. Prefabs to build — component-by-component, with the fields that must be assigned
6. Scene setup — managers, camera, layout
7. Wire it up — the UnityEvent connections, as a table
8. First playtest — the smallest thing that should work, and what to check if it doesn't
9. Then add — the optional scripts, in the order they make sense
10. Common problems — three to five specific to this game