The Community Game Development Toolkit | Daniel Lichtman

The Community Game Development Toolkit is a set of tools that make it easy and fun for students, artists, researchers and community members to create their own visually rich, interactive 3D environments and story-based games without the use of coding or other specialized game-design skills. Building on the popular 3D game design engine Unity, the toolkit provides intuitive tools for diverse communities to represent their own traditions, rituals and heritages through interactive, visual storytelling. Projects can be built for desktop, mobile and VR applications.

In order to quickly create vibrant, visually rich scenes without the use of 3D modelling, the toolkit draws on creators’ own photos, collages, drawings and sound recordings to create objects and textures in 3D space. This technique allows creators to bring their own visual references and sensibility into the game environment and makes creative experimentation rewarding and fun for creators who may have no prior experience in 3D modelling or even visual art.

The toolkit provides a set of game components that make it easy to add many types of interactivity to games without the use of code. Creators can add interactive text to objects, for example, by dragging a game component to an object and typing the desired lines of text. Other functions include interactive, autonomous characters, mechanisms for moving from one scene to another, interactive objects such as doors or elevators, collecting inventory, and more. These readymade game components empower creators with no prior technical experience to create fully interactive and engaging 3D visual narratives and games.