Unity For Kids



  1. Unity Programming For Kids
  2. Unity For Kids Tutorial
  3. Unity For Kids Lake Worth
  4. Unity Videos For Children
  5. Unity Tutorial

When word of various sins—some quite severe—taking place in the church in Corinth reached Paul through a believer named Chloe, he penned a letter to admonish the church to be holy. Paul addressed what are probably the two most severe sins first and last. First, he rebuked the church for its open and willful disunity. Last, he corrected the church for failing to uphold the doctrine of resurrection.

I'd also argue that Unity's UI is a little overwhelming for a child's first foray into programming. As Rhyia says, this isn't the 80's any more, kids aren't going to be excited about dots moving around on a screen when you have Super Mario 3D World or whatever the kids are playing these days. Get the POLYGON Kids - Low Poly 3D Art by Synty package from Synty Studios and speed up your game development process. Find this & other Characters options on the Unity Asset Store. Sprint into Spring Sale is on: get 50% off top assets and score extra savings with coupon code SPRING2021. Our new Unity Student plan gives eligible students free access to the professional-grade 3D development tools used on the job across industries. Collaborate easily on school projects, get unlimited access to Learn Premium, work in the easy-on-the-eyes dark UI environment great for those late nights, and more.

Sadly, disunity continues to be a sin plaguing the church today. We see its rotten fruit all around us, especially on social media. While we might not be able to do much to address the broader issue of disunity today, we can do much to address any disunity or preserve unity in our local churches, or at least our kids ministries and individual groups. A united church is what we should present to our kids and what the watching world needs.

As we consider this week’s session, here are two key principles to remember:

Our Unity Is Rooted in the Gospel

Unity does not mean sameness. We can be united and different. We can be the same and not united. Our goal, then, must not uniformity. After all, God is the author of diversity.

He created different types of animals for a reason. He created different color flowers for a reason. He created different seasons for a reason. Diversity reveals God’s beauty and creativity.

We should welcome diversity—ethnicity, cultures, and perspectives. We should not be threatened by these, nor should we feel superior or inferior based on any.

When it comes to unity, there is one thing—and only one thing—that truly unites us: the gospel. Other things might unite is in part, but they are all secondary at best. The one thing that bonds us together was one, no matter what, is the work of Christ. All of our sins have been forgiven and removed because of Christ Jesus. We are declared righteous with the same perfect righteousness of Christ imputed to us. We are all children of God, equal with one another. This is the source of what unites us.

Our Unity Is a Demonstration of the Gospel

A united church is important for the church itself. We are to be a source of love, comfort, encouragement, accountability, and support. We are a family. And as such, we want to be a healthy family.

But as important as that reason for unity is, it might be secondary. A united church does not exist just for its own good, but for the good of our communities.

We have to be clear that our calling is to verbalize the gospel. We have to tell people the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we are not just to tell the gospel, we are to show it too. The gospel displayed strengthens the gospel spoken.

Unity is at the core of the gospel, which is why unity is so important for us to display. Think about it. The gospel is about our broken relationship with God restored through the work of Christ. It is also about our broken relationships with one another restored through the power of Christ. In Christ, we are once again able to live our created purpose as image bearers of God—being in loving relationship with God and others.

This is why division is not just a hindrance to the gospel, it is antithetical to the gospel. A divided church doesn’t just obscure the gospel, it negates the core of its message. The watching world does not need a church that looks the same; it needs a church that looks very different but stands in unbreakable unity around the gospel that we share.

If a choir is singing in great harmony, it’s not because they are singing the same parts; it’s because they’re adding their part to the same song. It is the goal that produces the unity. Unity is not sameness. Unity has to do with same purpose.” — Tony Evans

Tony Evans, Tony Evans’ Book of Illustrations (Chicago, Il: Moody, 2009), 337.

Every week, Karen Jones and I offer guidance to help you as you prepare to teach every session of The Gospel Project for Preschool and Kids. Listen in as we discuss:

  • The big idea of the session
  • Any areas of caution or requiring additional prep time
  • What we hope God will do through this session
http://media.blubrry.com/tgpkidsleadertraining/p/ministrysites.s3.amazonaws.com/podcasts/thegospelproject_kids/TGP_Kids_SPR21_U32S3.mp3

Podcast (kidsleadertraining): Play in new window | Download

This training is available on Ministry Grid, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and other podcast platforms.

Related

Unity is a great tool for prototyping everything from games, to interactive visualisations. In this article, we run through all you need to know to get started using Unity.

First, a little bit about me: I’m a hobbyist unity developer, 3d modeler and graphic designer who’s worked with Unity and Blender for over 5 years. I’m now a Financial Maths student at University College Dublin, and occasionally I do freelance graphic design, web prototyping, and game prototyping.

Introduction

Kids

This article is aimed at anyone who has never used Unity before, but has some previous experience programming or in web design / development. By the end of this article, you should have a good general overview of the engine as well as all the necessary functions and code to start making a basic game.

Why Unity?

If you want to make games

There’s really very few options when it comes to Indie Game development. The three main choices if you want to build games are Unreal, Unity or GameMaker.

Unity is probably the least opinionated of the 3 platforms. It gives you a very raw product out of the box, but is highly flexible, well-documented, and highly extensible to build pretty much any genre of game you can think of.

There are plenty of highly successful games such as Escape from Tarkov (FPS), Monument Valley (Puzzler), and This War of Mine (Strategy / Survival) all built in Unity.

In reality the engine you build your first game on is probably not critical, so my advice is just to pick one and go with it.

If you want to prototype user experiences

Since unity is just an engine with a bunch of physics, animation, and real time 3d rendering, it’s also a great space to make fully fledged interactive prototypes for UX studies.

Unity has full support for VR and AR and hence could be a great tool for exploring architecture, automations and simulations with clients.

Sections to this article

  • Why Unity?
  • Unity Editor Window
  • Unity Game Objects
  • Unity Builtin Components
  • Creating Custom Components
  • Structure of a MonoBehaviour
  • Manipulating GameObjects
  • Raycasting
  • Collision detection
  • Advanced Features
  • Advice For Newcomers
  • Nice Resources and Communities
  • Conclusion

Unity editor window

The editor window is split up into a couple of sections. We will cover this very briefly as we will refer to it constantly throughout the article. If your familiar with this already just skip past!

Scene View: Allows placement and movement of GameObjects in the Scene
Game View: Previews how the player will see the scene from the camera
Inspector: Provide details on the selected GameObject in the scene.
Assets / Project: All prefabs, textures, models, scripts etc are stored here
Hierarchy: Enables nesting and structuring of GameObjects within the scene

Now we’re good to start!

Unity Game Objects

Unity Programming For Kids

What are GameObjects

GameObjects are the core building block of everything in the Unity games engine. The name almost gives it away:

Anything you place within a scene in Unity must be wrapped in a ‘game object.’

If you’ve got a web design background, you can think of GameObjects as being a lot like <div> elements! Extremely boring containers, but are highly extensible to create complex functionality or visuals.

Literally everything from particle effects, cameras, players, UI elements, … (the list goes on) is a GameObject.

Creating Hierarchy

Like a <div> in web development, a GameObject is also a container. Just as you nest <div>s to create varied and desirable layouts or abstractions you may wish to do the same with games objects.

The logic behind nesting game objects is much the same as web development, I’ll give a few examples…

Clutter & Efficiency

Web Analogy: You’ve got many similar elements which may be dynamically generated on the fly in response to user interaction and want to keep them tidy.
Unity Translation: Your building a Minecraft clone and you’ve loads of blocks in the scene, you need to add and remove ‘chunks’ of blocks from the scene for performance reasons. Thus having them parented to an empty GameObject for each chunk makes sense, as deleting the chunk parent removes all the children blocks.

Positioning

Web Analogy: You want to keep the position of the content contained ‘relative’ to the container and not to the web page.
Unity Translation: You’ve created a bunch of helper drones which hover around the player. You would really not rather write code to tell them to chase after the player, so instead you instantiate them as children of the player game object.

Unity Builtin Components

The Actor Component Model

GameObjects on their own are pretty useless — as we’ve seen they’re pretty much just containers. In order to add functionality to them we have to add components, which are essentially scripts written in either C# or Javascript.

Unity works off an Actor Component model, put simply the GameObjects are the actors and the Components are your scripts.

If you’ve written any web apps before you’ll be familiar with the idea of creating small reusable components such as buttons, form elements, flexible layouts that have various different directives and customisable properties. Then assembling these small components into larger web pages.

Kids

The big advantage of this approach is the level of reusability and clearly defined communication channels between elements. Likewise in game development, we want to minimise the risk of unintended side effects. Small bugs tend to spiral out of control if you’re not careful, and are extremely difficult to debug. Thus creating small, robust and reusable components is critical.

Key Built-in Components

I think it’s time for a few examples of the built in components provided by the Unity Games engine.

  • MeshFilter: Allows you to assign materials to a 3D mesh to a GameObject
  • MeshRender: Allows you to assign materials to a 3D Mesh
  • [Box | Mesh]Collider: Enables detection of GameObject during collisions
  • Rigidbody: Enables realistic physic simulation to act on GameObjects with 3d Meshes and will be trigger detection events on box colliders
  • Light: Illuminates portions of your scene
  • Camera: Defines the player viewport to be attached to a GameObject
  • Various UI Canvas Components for displaying GUIs

There are loads more, but these are the main ones you’ll need to get familiar with. One tip is that you can access all the docs for these through the unity manual and scripting reference offline wherever you are:

Creating Custom Components

The builtin components control physics and visuals primarily, but to really make a game, you’re going to need to accept user input and manipulate those standard components as well as the GameObjects themselves.

To start creating components, go into the desired GameObject > Add Component > type the name of your new component in the search bar > new script (c#).
Lessons

As a general recommendation I’d advise against using Javascript in Unity. It hasn’t been kept updated with all the great stuff that came with ES6, and most of the more advanced stuff relies on C# stuff ported over to Javascript… It just becomes a one giant work-around in my experience.

Structure of a MonoBehaviour

Key Functions

All components inherit from the MonoBehaviour Class. It includes several standard methods, most importantly:

  • void Start() which is called whenever an object containing the script is instantiated in the scene. This is useful anytime we want to perform some initialisation code, eg. set a player’s equipment after they spawn into a match.
  • void Update() which is called every frame. This is where the bulk of code involving user input will go, updating various properties such as the motion of the player in the scene.
Kids

Inspector Variables

Often we want to make components as flexible as possible. For example all weapons might have a different damage, rate of fire, has_sight etc. Firefox for mac osx. Whilst all the weapons are essentially the same thing we may want to be able to create different variations quickly through the unity editor.

Another example where we might want to do this is when creating a UI component that tracks user mouse movements and places a cursor in the viewport. Here we might want to control the sensitivity of the cursor to movements (if the user was using a joystick or gamepad vs a computer mouse). Thus it would make sense to have these variable easy to change both in edit mode and also experiment with them during runtime.

We can do this easily by simply declaring them as public variables in the body of the component.

Accepting user input

Of course, we want our game to respond to user input. The most common ways to do that are using the following methods in the Update() function of a component (or anywhere else you like):

  • Input.GetKey(KeyCode.W) Returns True W key is being held down
  • Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.W) Returns True when W key is first pressed
  • Input.GetAxis(“Vertical”), Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”) Returns between -1,1 mouse input movement

Manipulating GameObjects

Once we have user input we want GameObjects within our scene to respond. There are several types of responses we may consider:

Unity For Kids Tutorial

  • Translation, Rotation, Scale
  • Create new GameObjects
  • Sending messages to existing GameObjects / components

Transformations

GameObjects all have a transform property which enable various useful manipulations on the current game object to be performed. Omnifocus for mac os on torrent.

The methods above are fairly self explanatory, just note that we use lowercase gameObject to refer to the GameObject which owns this specific instance of the component.

In general it’s a good practice to use local[Position,Rotation] rather than the global position / rotation of an object. This usually makes it easier to move objects in a manner that makes sense, as the local space axis will be oriented and centered on the parent object rather than the world origin and x,y,z directions.

If you need to convert between local and world space (which often is the case) you can use the following:

Unity For Kids Lake Worth

As you can imagine, there is some fairly simple linear algebra behind this hinted at by the ‘Inverse’ in the method name.

Creating new GameObjects

Since GameObjects are basically everything in your scene, you might want to be able to generate them on the fly. For example if your player has some sort of projectile launcher you might want to be able to create projectiles on the fly which have their own encapsulated logic for flight, dealing damage, etc…

First we need to introduce the notion of a Prefab. We can create these simply by dragging any GameObject in the scene hierarchy into the assets folder.

This essentially stores a template of the object we just had in our scene with all the same configurations.

Once we have these prefab components we can assign them to inspector variables (as we talked about earlier) on any component in the scene, so that we can create new GameObjects as specified by the prefab at any time.

We can then perform ‘instantiation’ of the prefab and manipulate it to the desired location in the scene and establish the necessary parent relationships.

Accessing other GameObjects and Components

Often we need to communicate with other GameObjects as well as their associated components. Once you have a reference to a game object this is pretty simple.

Unity For Kids
ComponentName comp = some_game_object.GetComponent<ComponentName>();

After that you can access any of the public methods / variables of the component in order to manipulate the GameObject. This is the straightforward bit, however actually obtaining the reference to the GameObject can be done in several ways…

Access via inspector variable

This is the most straightforward. Simply create a public variable for the GameObject, as we’ve demonstrated earlier with the prefabs, and manually drag and drop it onto the component via the inspector. Then access the variable as above.

Access via tagging

We can tag GameObjects or prefabs via the inspector and then use the find game object functions to locate references to them.

This is simply done as below.

GameObject some_game_object = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag(“Brick”);

Access via transform

If we wish to access components in some parent object we can easily do this via the transform attribute.

ComponentName comp = gameObject.transform.parent.GetComponent<ComponentName>();

Access via SendMessage

Alternatively if we want to send a message to many other components or wish to message an object which is far up a nested hierarchy, we can use the send message functions, which accept the name of the function followed by the arguments.

gameObject.SendMessage(“MethodName”,params); // Broadcast message
gameObject.SendMessageUpwards(“MethodName”, params); // Only received by components which are nested above.

Raycasting

You may have heard of this before when people compare FPS games that are ‘physics based’ or ‘ray based’. Raycasting is essentially like having a laser pointer which, when it comes into contact with a ‘collider’ or ‘rigidbody’, it returns a ‘hit’ and passes back the details of the object.

There are two scenarios where this comes in handy (There’s probably loads more):

  1. If you were designing a weapon system for a game, you could use raycasting for hit detection, and even customise the length of the ray so that melee items ‘hit’ only at short ranges
  2. Create a ray from the mouse pointer to a point in 3d space, ie if you wish the user to be able to select units with their mouse in a strategy game.

As you can see, the code for this is a little bit more involved. The key thing to understand is that to cast a ray to where the mouse is pointing in 3d space requires the ScreenPointToRay transformation. The reason for this is the camera is rendering a 3d space as a 2d viewport on your laptop screen, so naturally there is a projection involved to transfer back to 3d.

Collision detection

Earlier we mentioned the Collider and Rigidbody components which can be added to an object. The rule for collisions is that one object in the collision must have a rigidbody and the other a collider (or both have both components). Note that when using raycasting, rays will only interact with objects with collider components attached.

Once setup within any custom component attached to the object, we can use the OnCollisionEnter, OnCollisionStay and OnCollisionExit methods to respond to collisions. Once we have the collision information we can get the GameObject responsible and use what we learned earlier to interact with components attached to it as well.

One thing to note is that rigid-bodies provide physics such as gravity for objects, so if you want this turned off you will need to check the is_kinematic on.

Advanced Features

We won’t go into any of this now but perhaps in a future article — just to make you aware that they exist.

Creating GUI’s

Unity has a fully fledged UI engine for laying out the GUI for your game. In general these components work pretty similarly to the rest of the engine.

Extending the Unity Editor

Unity enables you to add custom buttons to your inspectors so that you can affect the world during edit mode. For example, to help with world building you might develop a custom tool window for building modular houses.

Animation

Unity has a graph-based animation system which enables you to blend and control animations on various objects such as players implementing a bone based animation system.

Materials and PBR

Unity runs off a physically-based rendering engine which enables real time lighting and realistic materials. Canopus edius pro for mac. The reality is you will either need to learn 3d modeling first or use models made and optimised by someone else before you get to this, in order to make stuff that actually looks good.

Advice For Newcomers

If you’re planning on writing your first game, don’t underestimate the complexity and time it takes to write even the most trivial of games. Remember most of the games that come out on Steam have teams working on them for years full-time!

Pick a simple concept and break it down into small achievable milestones. It’s highly recommended to separate your game into as small independent components as possible, as you’re much less likely to run into bugs if you keep the components simple rather than monolithic code blocks.

Before you go and write any code for any part of your game, go and research what someone else has done before to solve the same problem — chances are they’ll have a much slicker solution.

Nice Resources and Communities

Game design has one of the best communities of any out there, and there are loads of highly skilled pros in the industry who put content up for free or for next to nothing. It’s a field that requires 3d Modelers, Concept Artists, Game Designers, Programmers and so on. I’ve linked some great general resources that I’ve come across for each of these fields below:

Concept Art

  • Feng Zhu Design School (Over 90 hour long concept art tutorials)
  • Tyler Edlin Art (Great BST art community with feedback from pros on monthly challenges)
  • Art Cafe (Interviews and Workshops with Famous Concept Artists)
  • Trent Kaniuga (Illustrator and 2D artist who’s also making his own game)

3D Modelling

  • CG Cookie (Best Mesh Modeling Basics in Blender Ever, they’ve loads of other excellent content for blender)
  • Tor Frick (Hard Surface Modelers & Sculptors in Blender)
  • Gleb Alexandrov (Short powerful rendering tutorials in Blender)

Game Design

  • DoubleFine Amnesia Fortnight (GameDevs who do a 2 week hackathon and record their entire design process)
  • GameMakers Toolkit (Examines Game Design Principles)

Programming

Unity Videos For Children

  • Handmade Hero (Writing a game and engine from scratch in C)
  • Jonathan Blow (Indie dev who livestreams his game development)
  • Brackeys (Nice Unity Tutorials)

Unity Tutorial

Conclusion

Hope you guys liked this tutorial! I do a bit of graphic design work as well as game and UI prototypes so check out my portfolio! I’m also on linked in.

Portfolio| LinkedIn