Game to Develop Games Within?

We are working on a research proposal involving game development for middle-grade students. What we would like to do is develop a "game" within Unity that can serve as a simplified game development environment for the students.

So the question is, does it seem feasible to allow actions within a game to act as selections as to how that game instance will behave in future executions? I know that this may sound a little obtuse. But our goal is to develop a graphically rich and compelling game that can basically be modified in different ways by each students as if they developed the game themselves, most likely by selection of from an existing set of objects.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Yes, it's entirely possible.

However I'd question why you don't simply teach U3D, or if it's too complex, GameMaker?

 

most likely becase it is the worst program ever made

i was going to make a game maker like rpg maker but 3d but couldent think of how to make a scripting editor feesable. if you find out could you please share

But yes its compleatly dooable, but as NPSF3000 said why no teach unity, or if its too complex RPG maker?

 

Thanks very much for the quick replies.

I should have mentioned that I am absolutely new to the gaming world. So the only knowledge I have right now is from some quick online searches. (However, I do have degrees in computer science.) Having looked at Unity, it seemed to be well supported and have the features that we need. Specifically, we want to be able to first develop games run on PCs (and browsers), but later in the project we want to generate the games for use on mobile devices too.

As far as the students being trained to use a development environment, we are going to work with 5th graders in their math classes, and will have limited time to get them up to speed on anything but a very simplified environment. The goal of the project is to have students develop their own games that require the mathematics concepts being learned - a kind of "learning by doing."

 

We had (Have?) another member here who was going to make a presentation about game development to middleschoolers. Maybe he could pop in this thread for a bit.


I modded games for years (namely Warcraft3). If you want to quickly prototype nice looking and well functioning games I'd probably go with Starcraft2 over unity. It won't be quite as game devolopment-y, but you'd have a massive library of models and effects to use. Last I knew it had a GUI for scripting. SC2 is also a fairly pretty looking game. Of course, you wouldn't be able to put games onto phones..

 

Have a look at Stencyl. http://www.stencyl.com/ As far as I can see it uses drag and drop style programming and a built in physics engine to let you create games. It's inspired by Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/). Just the act of setting up the physics engine will need your students to understand things like co-ordinates, gravity and so on.
These are both 2D engines if you're interested in 3D have a look at Alice http://www.alice.org/. Its a 3D programming environment designed for education.
I think you'll find that there are lot of other attempts to do what you're thinking of doing and your best bet may be to do some assessment on what is already there and then maybe improve it rather than reinvent the wheel. I think both Scratch and Alice are open source so this could be very possible.

 

Check out littlebigplanet 2