The Build
All year you build real, shippable software. First semester is one long project: your fork of cs-curriculum-main grows from a walking hero into a full game — a 2D RPG that becomes a 2D platformer when you enter a cave — ending with a boss fight that is entirely yours. Second semester you fork the Card-Game-Template for the card jam, and everything converges on theAP Create performance task. Push to GitHub every single class.
Phase 1 — The Overworld (Sep-Nov)
PlayerController.cs (v1)
The script that runs the year: serialized speed fields, Input.GetAxis for direction, direction × speed × Time.deltaTime, your first movement method, and the animation wiring (IsWalking, WalkDir, Attack). In 2.2 you discover that method walks straight through walls, and choose a physics-respecting replacement you can defend.Build it →
Colliders, stats & the pickup family
The unit where the physics engine switches on: nothing in the project had a collider or a rigidbody before it. Coins tick up on trigger pickups, spikes knock health down on collision, potions heal with a max-health cap (your first if), and death throws you back. Coins and health live on PlayerController for now — Debug.Log is your HUD all semester.
TurretController.cs + Projectile.cs
Your first real adversary: a detection radius built from Vector3.Distance, rate-limited shooting with a cooldown timer, and projectiles that Instantiate, fly, and Destroy. Difficulty lives in serialized fields you tune in playtests.
EnemyController.cs (patrol, chase, attack, return)
The full state machine: a patrol you design yourself, an aggro radius that flips it to chase, a close-range attack on a damage cooldown, and the fall-back to patrol when you escape. Three distances, three behaviors — compound conditionals you can draw as a diagram, then upgrade to named states.
AxeItem, the door, and the cave
Item pickups set inventory bools and swap your whole animation set; the lever's UnityEvents open a door somebody else already wired; and then SceneManager.LoadScene exposes a real problem — every stat you own resets on scene load. Unit 5 ends with the year's biggest refactor: your stats move out of PlayerController into a persistentStatManager, and the HUD moves into the scene the game actually begins in.
Phase 2 — The Cave (Nov-Jan)
PlayerController.cs (v2) — jump, double jump, ladders
AddForce impulses, ground checks so you cannot fly, a jumps-remaining counter that the boots pickup raises to two, and feel polish: faster falls, coyote time. Unit 7 then adds a climbing state for ladders — built from the cave tileset, since no ladder art ships.
Your cave level (tilemaps)
A large multi-area cave built with the tile palette from the included CavesTileSet and CaveEntranceTileSet: collision, sorting layers, flow, difficulty ramp, secrets. Playtested by your classmates before break.
BossController.cs — YOUR boss fight
The first build that is fully yours: a written spec first (health, attacks, phases, win/lose), then the build — assembled from the existing enemy art, with attack patterns, phase changes, a player attack to fight back, and a health display you choose. The semester 1 final on Jan 21 is a normal B day: demo day plus a concepts check.
Phase 3 — Data & Systems (Jan-Feb)
Playtest analysis (data/playtests.csv)
Your own playtest data as a dataset: what happened in your cave, filtered, summarized, and argued — plus the bias and ethics roundtable that the AP exam loves to ask about.Download the dataset →
Phase 4 — Jam Season (Feb-Apr)
Jam 1: The 2-Button Game
A complete game built on exactly two inputs. Pitched, built, playtested, polished, and shown in 3 weeks — the full development cycle the Create PT rubric calls CRD-2.E, compressed and real.
Jam 2: The Card Game (your fork of Card-Game-Template)
Lists, arrays, and ScriptableObjects: Card_data assets define your cards, GameManager holds decks and hands as Lists, and you fill in Shuffle(), Deal(), and AI_Turn(). A deck of cards is the best list on the AP exam — you will have built one.
Phase 5 — The Create PT (Apr)
Your Create PT program + video + PPR
An individual program with a list, a parameterized procedure, and an algorithm with sequencing, selection, and iteration — built in 9 in-class hours, captured in a video, and summarized in your Personalized Project Reference. Submitted to the AP Digital Portfolio by April 30, 11:59 PM ET.The full requirements →
Season 2 — After the exam (May-Jun)
Jam 3: The Grid/Symmetry Game
Post-exam: build a game around a grid (match-3, 2048, minesweeper, tactics) or around symmetry (mirrored levels, twin-stick echoes). You know more than you think — prove it.
Jam 4: Placeholder (topic TBA)
A fourth jam runs here if the year allows — topic picked by the class. If snow days or slow jams eat the calendar, these days absorb the shift. The year ends with a retro: your September commit vs. your June build, side by side.