This course series provides a lot of very interesting and useful background information regarding different aspects of game development, in the theory lessons. However, the theory lessons are pretty much disconnected from the practice lessons.
As for the practice lessons: It is nice and convenient to have an extensive set of premade assets that allow you to fairly quickly build a nice and complete 2D or 3D game (just make sure to replace the music). It allows you to directly dive into level design and game mechanics, and having fun with play testing.
It must be said that the intern doing the practice lessons knows his way in the assets very well. This causes him to navigate lightning fast, which tends to require quite some pausing and replaying. This gets pretty annoying after a while if you try to play along with the videos. Also, many steps that could use some explanation are left unexplained, so sometimes it's difficult to get a good feeling of what you are actually doing.
I think it's important to mention that there are some downsides to the use of an extensively developed system of prefabs and scripts that largely remains a black box for the trainee.
Quite some time is spent on learning how to use and configure the provided assets, which in fact has nothing to do with Unity itself. These steps are required to put the game together, make it work and learn about level design and so on. But, because the possibilities to reuse these assets and scripts in games of your own are very limited, that's useless knowledge if you want to build your own game. Of course, if you are an experienced programmer you can dive into the scripts to learn from the code and the concepts used, but then you'll be reverse engineering.
Also, the distinction between MSU-specific functionality and actual Unity Editor functionality is not always made clear, which can be a problem if you are new to Unity.
Because very little time is spent on explaining the underlying code, you will not be able to build your own game from scratch after completing these four courses. This might be addressed in part 5, the capstone project, but I haven't done that one yet.
If you really want to learn about how stuff works under the hood (that is, developing C# scripts), I strongly recommend to follow the four-part "C# Programming for Unity Game Development Specialization" by the University of Colorado, available here on Coursera.
You don't need C# experience and you'll be introduced to the Unity Editor as well. The assets are simple and limited (you'll have to create some yourself) and the resulting games are low level and 2D only, but it's an excellent way to learn the underlying mechanics and how to implement specific behavior in 2D games by hands-on experience.
The primary reason for me to follow the Game Design and Development course series is that it addresses 3D game development, which is left untouched entirely by Colorado's specialization. In fact, the Colorado University Programming Specialization and this Game Design and Development course series complement each other very well with little overlap.
Here, I have learned how to create a 3D game in Unity. And, as said, this series contains a huge amount of interesting information about the game development process, like working in a team, the creative process and a lot of other non-technical aspects of game design and development. That is very useful knowledge if you want to enter the Game Development industry and several things can very well be applied in other branches, too.
