Using the Game Engine Unity Efficiently in Teaching: Development of a fully-automated webserver-based build pipeline

The Unity game engine is becoming increasingly popular in professional architecture, engineering, and teaching. Unity provides the ability to bring architectural geometries developed during a design process into a virtual reality (VR) environment. This gives designers an additional tool for developing their designs using VR. Until now, the cumbersome and time-consuming build process of a Unity project has been a challenge. This process involves compiling a Unity project for a target platform, such as Windows or Android. Here, many options have to be chosen in advance. In the context of a course in group format, all groups usually have to make the same choices. So far, there has been a lack of possibilities to specify these options centrally. This paper describes the development and prototypical use of a Unity build pipeline developed at the Technical University of Darmstadt, which simplifies working with the Unity game engine. By providing an outsourced build process for Unity projects and further implemented functionalities especially intended for teaching, a significant time advantage in the completion phase of Unity projects is achieved. Therefore, both lecturers and students within a teaching-learning scenario can focus more attention on the actual content in Unity, such as the architectural design process.