Glossary

Every concept in this sheet, plus the smaller terms it uses. Select a concept to open its card.

2D or 3D: 2D games use sprites on a flat plane with x and y positions; 3D games use meshes, cameras, lighting and a third axis. 3D multiplies the art, animation, camera and physics work.

C# essentials for Unity: The parts of C# you use daily in Unity: classes, fields and properties, lists and dictionaries, enums, interfaces, events, and ScriptableObject for shared data assets.
Cloning classic games: Rebuilding a small, well-known game such as Pong, Breakout, Flappy Bird, Snake or Asteroids to learn the engine without having to design anything.
Components and composition: Building game objects from small parts: a health component, a mover, a sprite, a collider.

Debugging games: Printing values to the console, pausing on breakpoints in your IDE, and drawing debug lines, shapes and text in the game view to see what the code thinks is happening.

Engine licences and fees: As of 2026-09: Godot is free under the MIT licence with no fees.
Events, signals and dispatchers: A way for an object to announce that something happened, such as "health changed", so that any number of listeners can react without the sender knowing about them.
Exposed variables: Variables marked so they appear in the editor, where you or a designer can tune them without touching code.

Game engine: Software that runs the game loop for you and provides rendering, physics, input, audio, animation, an editor and export to each platform.
Game jam: An event where people make a game to a theme in a fixed time, usually 48 to 96 hours, then play and rate each other's entries.
Game loop: The loop every game runs many times a second: read input, update the game state, then draw the frame.

MonoBehaviour and GetComponent: The base class for Unity scripts that live on GameObjects.

Prototype and vertical slice: A prototype answers one question, usually "is this mechanic fun?", with placeholder shapes.

Scope control: Deciding the smallest version of a game that is still fun, writing it down, and saying no to everything else until it ships.
Script lifecycle: The functions the engine calls on your code at set moments: once when the object is created or enters play, then every frame, then at a fixed physics rate, and finally when it is destroyed.
State machine: Modelling an object as one state at a time, such as idle, running, jumping or attacking, with clear rules for moving between states.

Version control for games: Git with a .gitignore that skips generated folders (Unity Library, Godot .godot, Unreal Intermediate and Saved), and Git LFS for large binary files such as textures, audio and models.