The course walks you through hooking together a number of pre-built components. You get a working game at the end, but there's not much explanation about what those pre-fab components do or how they work. I "dug in", figured it out (mostly), and learned a lot in the process, but some documentation on the pre-fabs would have really helped. The course project asks you to make "significant" modifications to the pre-fabs, but expect to spend some time reading documentation and watching youtube tutorials to actually do that. Also, the course uses a "Peer Review" grading system. Apparently, we had some "trolls" in our group who would "fail" people without giving any feedback whatsoever. You have no recourse for this other than re-submitting and getting new reviewers. I was furious when it happened to me, but others seemed to take it better than I did. Overall, I learned a lot and had fun doing it, but (again) you should be prepared to spend some time finding and using external sources of information. (The pre-fabs use "Colliders" and "Physics", for example, but the course provides no information on these at all.)

Nice course! Lots of practice. Communication with fellow students is maintained. All the basic tools are shown to beginners. But for the slightly advanced it can be boring, but they too can find something new and finish the course quickly. And I will go to the next courses. Good luck!

The course covers a great deal of information and tries to do so in a clear and concise way. Due to the fact that there is so much and that this course is trying to account for the fact that there is a wide range of learners with various levels.

The course says that it is fine for true beginners and I agree withe the sentiment overall but there was still a sizable amount to this course that left some things to be desired.

For one, I personally felt that the course content for week 3 and week 4 should have been switched around. Also if you are a true beginner when it comes to computing languages, particularly C#. You should start with a course like that. I personally wish I had taken a C# class and then come here as it would have made the assignments far more digestible.

The course quickly goes from teaching you how to walk, and then suddenly expects you to learn how to sprint. This is an unreasonable jump in expectations in my opinion, especially when the course markets itself as being suitable for true beginners and not requiring programming skills.

This course is also taught partially by a TA. With that in mind, they are a TA and not a full fledged instructor so we can't expect that from them. However, the TA works a little too quickly and does not narrate what they are doing all the time and it can get easy to become lost if you are not constantly pausing and reviewing the lesson to see exactly what is happening step-by-step.

Not a bad course, but it has a lot of room for improvement. Take a beginners C# course before coming to this one and expect a lot of pausing and reviewing if you are just starting out.

The course was designed to be a perfect balance of tutorial approach and self-study. The peer assignments were a great avenue for showing the culmination of all your attained skills, and the peer reviews were helpful for knowing how to improve on other aspects.

This course has given me a comfortable understanding of how the unity engine works and how various systems within the engine work. The one gripe I have being the glazed over explanation of C# code. If you take this specialization and course, expect to either have a grasp on the concepts of C# or learn C# from other resources.

My main complaint about this course is the way the peer reviewing can work with no recourse to ask a question or dispute.

The criteria for the peer reviews are objective, not subjective like (did this include two out of three build types) One reviewer clearly made a mistake and marked one as wrong and there was no way ask that reviewer to look again, or report an inaccurate review to an instructor.

The course was great, but the review process is annoying an can affect your grade.

The Course is great for beginners like me in game developer. I have gained knowledge in making games in both 3D and 2D, all of the basics in creating a game, also refreshed my knowledge in programming and also gained more skills for programming games.

I had a great experience during learning through this course. This course is highly recommended for the students and beginners who want to learn Game Development from scratch.

Great until Week 3! This course is great until Week 3 when the professor shifts over to have a Teaching Assistant record all of the videos instead of him. The TA moves too quickly, often goes silent as he changes settings, or inserts text captions in the video instead of speaking, and is generally confusing and extremely frustrating.

Hello, everyone,

I'm very glad to finish this course and the journey was really AMAZING , I must thank the instructor for creating such a wonderful course, this course was sponsored by my university and Coursera, so they also deserve thanks.

I have really learned a lot from this course and will try to complete the next courses ASAP if I get sponsorship.

With the learning from this course and my effort. I have created a very simple game and published it on Google Playstore and itch.io, I would be very happy if people play it. Everyone is welcome to download and play the game, you can also share your thoughts.

Google Playstore Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sadadnan.balldropchallange

Itch.io Link: https://sad-adnan.itch.io/ball-drop-challenge

This is a good introduction to game design. The lectures delivered by the amiable instructor are motivating and easy to understand. However, instructions for building the actual game are delivered with much less clarify by the teaching assistant. He skims through important details while repeatedly mentions common knowledge as how to unzip a file or how to save a project. By the 3rd course (3D shooter), I still have no clue how to do vertex snapping consistently (the part where you hold V to line up edges between objects), and I just figured out myself how to scale an object uniformly (and no, it's not "hold alt" - it is "hold alt after starting to scale the object).

Excellent introduction to Game Design and Development! I already feel that I can do so much with Unity, even when I know there is still a lot lot more to learn, but this was a fantastic start!

I loved the course. I have learned a lot and produced a great work in the end. Made me feel great about myself. Thank you Michigan State University, Thank you Coursera!

Amazing course, I learned A LOT especially in the last project when I had to nearly make a whole new game.

Thanks for the instructors for thier work.

A really great introduction to unity and great videos that will guide through the course

Wonderful introductory course to the world of game development.

Brian Winn is a lovely professor, his explanation is crystal clear, however the 2nd instructor who was doing the unity tutorials was rushing a lot which made it a bit difficult to follow up.

I think it did a great job on introducing the engine, although I felt a bit limited by being provided everything I needed

Good first couple of weeks but in my opinion the later weeks need improvements (buggy scripts, pre-made assets, old fashioned shooter games)

Week 3 could have been better and more resourceful

Not very useful. Highly childish and unstructured.

Great start up course to get one well introduce to game design concepts and theories and also a bit of Unity programming fundamentals. I have a bit of background in programming logic from years ago and was able to use them well in dissecting the controller scripts given with the Unity project. Peer reviewing was also insightful to know that everyone is coming from all sort of levels. Some barely got things well while some was really able to take the basic game beyond and was able to come up with something unique of their own. It is possible to make a pretty solid game out of the project materials given if they would really put the time and effort in doing so. To wrap it up, great fundamental game design concepts to begin with and evenly paired with the right amount of programming as well but not to overcome one with too much information. Looking forward to the 2nd part.

This is a great introductory course. The lecture content and lessons are not very detailed or comprehensive. The course will not help in building foundational knowledge in any aspect of game design. It does however provide a great pre-made packages and assets, which is what game design and development would be like in the real world, where you start a new game project by reusing assets and code from older projects.

Courses like this are great for building up skills, and building up a library of sample projects. However the course does gloss over a lot of important topics and I am hoping that they are going to be covered in other courses of this specialization.

Straightforward learning. This course introduces a very comprehendible way to understand the Unity Game Engine. Before this course, I had experience in writing in JavaScript, Java, and C. I applied JavaScript to small based applications, so I really never saw a clear way to apply code to something else until this course. Through C# I saw programming concepts that were implemented to Game Design as a particular component. I learned that programming is just one small part of this process and there is a lot of creativity that goes into game design which made this course fun, and not just hard work. Or how the instructor says, it's hard fun.

This was my first class on game design, ever. That being said, most of it was easy to follow along. I felt like I really learned some great basic stuff. I felt that maybe the order of some of the lessons was a little different than what I would have done. I also wished I knew how to really change up that last assignment, but I don't have any coding or programming skills yet, so I wasn't able to run wild with it like I'd wanted. I'm going to wait to take the second course and first take a C sharp class. Overall, this was a great foundation for my game designing! Thank you for offering this!

Really good course to get started in creating games and using Unity/meddling with C#. While the final task/projects asks a lot, for less technical people, they can still find alternative ways to make their game standout. Like focus on level design, main menu and UI, and changing parameters on the inspector. This is a good starting point to build game prototypes and adding them to a beginner portfolio. Following the course and interacting or evaluating peers can help students stay motivated and make their first game.