Consolidate your Unity knowledge
Reenforce your OOP & C# skills
Learn & practice true Agile
Learn & practice time, project and tasks management techniques
Practice & Develop your communication skills
Develop confidence and build trust
Become a Unity Ninja!
What is the Agile Unity Dojo ?
It is a 5 days seminar for intermediate and advanced Unity developers, to consolidate their Unity knowledge, reenforce their project architecture & development skills, learn and practice Agile values & methodologies, develop their project and tasks management skills, and ultimately, become Unity Ninjas.
Somewhere between a Unity master class, an Agile training, a Game Jam and a Self-Development seminar, this seminar is a large group coaching session, in which artists, designers and programmers gather to learn and rehearse the critical skills to deliver the best game (or product) on time, and on budget!
Why this Seminar ?
Because the majority of a game (or product) development lies in the unknown, both design wise and technically.
Thus, confidence, sound communication, priority management and coordination are skills, which along with a strong technical background, will make the difference in the end product quality.
You're smarter than you think!
All too often did I, as a trainer, realise people already have most of the technical skills it’ll take to deliver. Although, many of us come to doubt our skills or knowledge, and we grow a knowledge hunger way beyond our objectives.
As a matter of fact, learning new things and facing our own ignorance is all part of the job. No developer knows everything. Learning to learn what you’ll need to know before you even know what you need, with the strong confidence you’ll get the answer in time, can avoid unnecessary anxiety and make room for great creativity.
Agenda
Day 1 – Warm up
Participants get to know each others, form teams, learn about Agile values and principles, set the scope of the day and assemble assets / prototype.
Day 2 – Design & Architecture
Programmers and artists/designers organise to quickly deliver a prototype, while planning for future enhancements.
Day 3 – Game Play
Programmers and artists/designers work together to deliver a playable demo with all key features.
Day 4 – Clean Up
Programmers work on profiling and architecture optimisations and debugging, while artists/designers work on optimising assets.
Programmers and artists/designers put together unit and integration tests.
Day 5 – Retrospective and Wrap Up
After a review / retrospective, teams set new objectives and everyone plans what they need to learn to add new features.
At the end of the day, everyone shares with the others the challenges they faced and how they addressed them so that attendees get to learn from each other’s experience.
Take Away
Along with assets and project files, participants will be given PDF files highlighting key concepts exposed throughout the seminar.
FAQ
What are this seminar's primary objectives ?
Consider this seminar a transforming experience. A workshop to exercise, experiment and develop good habits.
Attendees will develop confidence, as they strengthen their technical knowledge, learn to prioritise their learning, and practice team communication and coordination.
Who’s this seminar for ?
This seminar is aimed at programmers, artists, designers, and anyone willing to learn programming and integration, practice technical skills, and develop personal organisation and efficient team communication, to produce a high quality product under a set amount of time.
Producers, product owners and other product managers/planners are welcome to participate too.
What is the seminar format ?
There will be limited theoretical lecture.
No step by step, pre-made examples.
This seminar applies Agile values to training and uses a reverse learning approach.
The seminar features 3 tracks : architecture (design), integration (technical art) and production (management).
Tracks are not exclusive, and every attendee is free to attend any panel and workshop.
What kind of game/product will the participants be working on throughout the seminar ?
Participants will form teams and choose a topic to work on, amongst a set of action, rhythm, and adventure games. They’ll choose the format (2D, 3D or VR) and platform (mobile, PC, console) they want to target.
Teams will be provided sample assets to work with. Attendees can also bring their own assets.
How long is the seminar ?
The seminar is 5 days long. It is long for a training, and short to produce a result.
The seminar does not aim at having you recreate a given sample or prototype, but instead to help you organise for never ending enhancement with Agile practices and proper project architecture.
What part/features of Unity will be covered ?
The “main program” includes key Unity features, such as Graphics, Physics, Audio, Animator State Machines, UI, Events and Inputs.
Custom panels and workshops on other specific features and programming concepts will be featured upon participants requests.
What are the pre-requisites ?
Attending artists and designers : need to be comfortable with the Editor (import resources, create a scene, create and organise objects in a scene, add components and assign resources).
Programmers : need to be familiar with object oriented programming principles (inheritance), C# language/.Net, and MonoBehaviour messages (Awake, Start, Update).
Is this a Unity masterclass or a project management training ?
While there is a strong focus on putting Agile methodologies in practice, the seminar aims at having participants learn about Unity’s key features in depth.
What is unique to this seminar though, is that Agile values are also meant to apply on knowledge acquisition.