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A Beginner's Guide To Machine Learning with Unity (Udemy.com)

Advanced games AI with genetic algorithms, neural networks & Q-learning in C# and Tensorflow for Unity

Created by: Penny de Byl

Last updated November 2023

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What you will learn

  • Build a genetic algorithm from scratch in C#.
  • Build a neural network from scratch in C#.
  • Setup and explore the Unity ML-Agents plugin.
  • Setup and use Tensorflow to train game characters.
  • Apply newfound knowledge of machine learning to integrate contemporary research ideas in the field into their own projects.
  • Distill the mathematics and statistic behind machine learning to working program code.
  • Use a Proximal Policy Optimisation to train a neural network.

How it compares

Against the other 155 rated Udemy courses in Machine Learning on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.5 out of 5higher than 62% of them
  • Reviews2,166#38 of 156 by number of reviews
  • Length13.1 hourslonger than 70% of them
  • Last updatedNovember 2023more recently than 54% of them

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Course Description

What if you could build a character that could learn while it played?  Think about the types of gameplay you could develop where the enemies started to outsmart the player. This is what machine learning in games is all about. In this course, we will discover the fascinating world of artificial intelligence beyond the simple stuff and examine the increasingly popular domain of machines that learn to think for themselves.

In this course, Penny introduces the popular machine learning techniques of genetic algorithms and neural networks using her internationally acclaimed teaching style and knowledge from a Ph.D in game character AI and over 25 years experience working with games and computer graphics.  In addition she's written two award winning books on games AI and two others best sellers on Unity game development. Throughout the course you will follow along with hands-on workshops designed to teach you about the fundamental machine learning techniques, distilling the mathematics in a way that the topic becomes accessible to the most noob of novices.  

Learn how to program and work with:

  • genetic algorithms

  • neural networks

  • human player captured training sets

  • reinforcement learning

  • Unity's ML-Agent plugin

  • Tensorflow

Contents and Overview

The course starts with a thorough examination of genetic algorithms that will ease you into one of the simplest machine learning techniques that is capable of extraordinary learning. You'll develop an agent that learns to camouflage, a Flappy Bird inspired application in which the birds learn to make it through a maze and environment-sensing bots that learn to stay on a platform.

Following this, you'll dive right into creating your very own neural network in C# from scratch.  With this basic neural network, you will find out how to train behaviour, capture and use human player data to train an agent and teach a bot to drive.  In the same section you'll have the Q-learning algorithm explained, before integrating it into your own applications.

By this stage, you'll feel confident with the terminology and techniques used throughout the deep learning community and be ready to tackle Unity's experimental ML-Agents. Together with Tensorflow, you'll be throwing agents in the deep-end and reinforcing their knowledge to stay alive in a variety of game environment scenarios.

By the end of the course, you'll have a well-equipped toolset of basic and solid machine learning algorithms and applications, that will see you able to decipher the latest research publications and integrate the latest developments into your work, while keeping abreast of Unity's ML-Agents as they evolve from experimental to production release.

What students are saying about this course:

  • Absolutely the best beginner to Advanced course for Neural Networks/ Machine Learning if you are a game developer that uses C# and Unity. BAR NONE x Infinity.

  • A perfect course with great math examples and demonstration of the TensorFlow power inside Unity. After this course, you will get the strong basic background in the Machine Learning.

  • The instructor is very engaging and knowledgeable. I started learning from the first lesson and it never stopped. If you are interested in Machine Learning , take this course.

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Instructor Details

Penny de Byl

Hi, I'm Dr Penny de Byl.  I'm a full stack developer of most things computer sciency and academic with a true passion for teaching.  I've been teaching others about games development, programming, computer graphics, animation and web design for over 25 years in universities in Australia and Europe at the full professor level. I've also consulted for Unity, SAE, the Australian Institute of Entertainment and Wikitude. My best selling textbooks including Holistic Game Development with Unity are used in over 100 institutions world-wide.  My graduates work at companies like Apple, Ubisoft, LinkedIn and Deloitte Digital.

I have an honours degree in computer graphics and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence for games characters.  Over the course of my career I've won numerous awards for teaching excellence at the state, national and international levels including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Unity Mobile Game Curriculum Competition. My approach to teaching computer science and related fields is project-based giving you hands-on workshops you can immediately get your teeth into.

I want you to leave my virtual classroom fully armed with a toolkit of skills for life-long learning.  I'm excited to now be focussing my efforts full-time on Udemy to bring my years of knowledge and experience to those eager to learn about technology.


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Reviews

4.5

2,166 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By Dipesh Kala on 4/6/2026

Never thought i would edit my rating , but here it is !! not suitable course in 2026 first of all from my experience , moreover there is somewhat less support and clarity at some parts of the course , thing are not as smooth as i expected from courses like these . been here around on unity from quite a time and such a believer in there courses , unlike this time!! Moreover things are deprecated too in this series , just Outdated stuff for 2026 from Unity Engine's POV.

By Rafał Siwierski on 7/18/2022

Good theoretical explanations and examples. One of the first video has bad quality, Im not able to see what is on the projector's screen. A big part of the course is tagged as deprecated. Earlier I thought that neural networks are solution for everything, now I'm understand that they are very limited, and not always but rather sometimes, produce a good results. I thoght that I can replace any AI alghorithm with neural network, but now, I see It's not so simple, and probably I will achieve better results with my own ai alghorithm.

By David Pulcifer on 7/28/2021

There is a lot of great material in this course, and I am really excited to apply this to future projects! I love that this course dives right in and gets you building Neural Networks without spending ages on theory and mathematics before you start making anything. Honestly, the math was much easier to learn when applying it in code, and the concepts solidified much faster than my previous attempts to learn ANNs other places. The main thing that I think needs improvement is the variable naming conventions make the code really hard to understand in the Neural Network sections. I'm really not a stickler for that sort of thing if it doesn't detract from learning, but in this case, the code is how the instructor is teaching the main concept, so in this case it would be much easier to grasp if the variable naming was more explanatory.

By Daniel Cortes on 12/20/2020

la leccion fue muy agradable, alguno que otro video no se logra distinguir bien desde el computador, pero la teoria es perfecta

By Jesse Williams on 12/20/2020

As always, Dr. Penny de Byl has hit it out of the park with this course.
I came into this course with a strong grasp of C# and Unity, and a fundamental (academic) understanding of ML, and learned a tremendous amount. The instructor, in all of her courses, always finds that perfect balance between deep explanation (for beginners) and allowing the student to gain new knowledge (for intermediate students) without being so technical as to lose the former or so basic as to lose the latter.
I've enrolled in, and at least partially consumed, several of her courses and so far I've found every one to be fantastic. Take any of her courses and you won't be disappointed.

By Mathews Nunes de Holanda Cavalcanti on 11/22/2020

It is being awesome until now! Penny explains the theoretical concepts in a very simple and useful way!

By Jorge Sebastian Mora Lara on 11/6/2020

Very good course, it explains well the bases of machine learning, the only thing is that it needs an update to the section that talks about the package ml-agents of unity to work with reinforcement learning

By Junaid Malik on 11/4/2020

Awesome course from Dr. Penny as always.

By Ivaylo Dimitrov on 10/1/2020

Great Course !

By Bar KES on 8/25/2020

Title is very difficult and codes are hard to understand :(

By Juan Carlos Granados Cardona on 8/22/2020

so far it has filed my expectations

By Holosim on 8/18/2020

The content is important to me right now. Video #6 is hard to see much of the slide content on screen. Based on other videos from this instructor, I'm confident it will get better.

Showing 12 of 427 reviews

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Overall Score : 90 / 100