📝 Lesson 7.1: Planning Your Mini-Game

You have all the pieces. Before we assemble them, let's do what every real developer does first — plan. A few minutes designing on paper saves hours of confused building.

🎯 Learning Objectives

Define the game's goal and core loop
List exactly what the game needs (and map it to skills you have)
Break the build into small, ordered steps
Set a realistic scope

Estimated Time: 25 minutes

In This Lesson

The Vision

Our mini-game — call it Star Collector: a player moves around a walled arena and collects all the stars before time runs out. Simple, satisfying, and it uses every skill from this course. Here's the target:

A real Unity render of the mini-game: a blue capsule player in a walled arena with six yellow star collectibles scattered around. — Figure 1: Star Collector (real render) — a walled arena, a player, and stars to collect. This is what we'll build across Module 7.

The Core Loop

The core loop is the short cycle a player repeats — the heartbeat of the game. For Star Collector:

graph LR A[Move toward a star] --> B[Collect it] B --> C[Score goes up + ding] C --> D{All collected?} D -->|no| A D -->|yes| E[You win! 🎉]

📖 Definition

Core loop: the repeating cycle of actions and rewards at the heart of a game. Nail a fun core loop and you have a fun game, even a tiny one.

What It Needs (and where you learned it)

Ingredient	From
A floor and walls to contain the player	Modules 1–2 (scenes, primitives, materials)
A player that moves with the keyboard	Module 4 (input & movement)
A camera that follows	Module 4 (camera follow)
Collectible stars (trigger + prefab)	Module 5 (physics, triggers, collectible)
A live score and win message	Module 6 (UI & GameManager)
A collect sound and music	Module 6 (audio)

💡 Notice: you already know how to build every single ingredient. Module 7 is just assembly. That's the payoff of learning the fundamentals in order.

The Build Plan

Break it into small, testable steps. Build and Play-test after each — never write everything then hope:

Level — floor, four walls, lighting (Lesson 7.2).
Player — capsule + movement + follow camera (reuse Module 4).
Stars — the collectible prefab, scattered (reuse Module 5).
Score & win — GameManager counts stars, declares a win (Lesson 7.3).
Polish — particles, post-processing, sound (Lesson 7.4).

⚠️ Scope discipline

Resist adding enemies, levels, power-ups now. Finish this small game first. A done game you can expand beats an ambitious one you abandon. You can always add more after it works end-to-end.

Hands-on Exercise

🏋️ Exercise: Write your plan

In a notes file, write one sentence describing your game's goal.
Sketch or list your core loop (4–6 steps).
List the ingredients and tick the ones you already know how to build (spoiler: all of them).
Optional: change one thing to make it yours — a different theme (collect coins? gems?), arena shape, or star count.

💡 Feeling ambitious?

Great — write those ideas in a "later" list. Build the core game first; pull from your later-list once it's playable.

🎯 Quick Quiz

Question 1: What is a "core loop"?

Question 2: Why plan and scope before building?

Summary

🎉 Key Takeaways

Define the goal and core loop before building.
List the ingredients — you already know how to build them all.
Break the build into small, testable steps and Play-test each.
Keep scope tight: finish the small game first.

🚀 What's Next?

Plan in hand, let's build. Lesson 7.2 constructs the arena — floor, walls, and lighting.