Unity is a powerful engine equipped with a variety of tools to meet your specific needs. Its intuitive and customizable editor provides great freedom in your workflow.

In this article, we'll review:

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies and first released in 2005. It's used for developing video games, simulations, and interactive content across various educational settings, including K-12 schools, universities, and vocational training programs. Unity teaches computer science, game development, and technical skills and creates interactive content for subjects like history, biology, and physics.

Unity has two main components: the Unity Hub, where you manage projects, licenses, and templates, and the Unity Editor, where you build and develop content.

Sign in using Unity Hub. Unity uses named user licenses. Each student must sign in using their Unity account to acquire a license.

If you don't have a multi-seat classroom license, you can use a free personal license.

There are multiple versions of the Unity Editor, and only the (Long Term Support) LTS versions are available on CloudApps Classroom. If you have existing projects or assets that are not compatible with one of the pre-installed versions, they must be migrated to one of the supported editor versions before they will work. The Unity Hub will attempt to download missing editor versions automatically, but this will fail because the student user is prohibited from installing new software on the virtual machine.

If you still need a specific version of the Unity Editor with your lab curriculum, contact itopia support and ask about our professional services for custom images and pricing.

Unity projects are made up of many assets, modules and files. An empty project can generate hundreds or thousands of small source files needed to build your game. The ephemeral nature of the virtual machine means that these files are not persisted and must be saved to an external location.

Google Drive and other cloud based storage options are not designed to handle folders with lots of small files and Unity projects cannot be saved directly to Google Drive. The desktop and student folder on the instance should also be avoided as it runs on a different filesystem and does not have the performance needed to handle many small files.

Use Unity Package Files to export your assets and save them to Google Drive. Unity package files are a single file like a zip file that contains only the essential assets needed in your project. This single file is much smaller than the entire project directory and can be copied to Google Drive and loaded directly from it.

Follow the steps below for abbreviated instructions on how to import and export a unitypackage file.
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1. Sign in to Google Drive. This is where unity asset package files will be loaded from and saved to.

2. Create an empty project using the 3D or 2D core base. External assets will be imported to this empty project.

3. Save the project to C:\Unity Projects

4. In the Unity Editor, import the .unitypackage file from Google Drive to the empty project by going to Assets > Import Package > Custom Package

5. When you are finished, export your work as a unity package and save it to Google Drive by going to Assets > Export Package… Do not include the sample scene in your export.

Note: This process takes 2 to 5 minutes every time you launch a new session.