Game Design Track

This course serves to introduce the various aspects of game design for those intending to work as part of management, production, and/or design teams. The student will begin with an analysis of gaming, with consideration of various platforms, game genres, playability, objectives, rule dynamics, and overall quality. Further, the student will learn the elements of production including game conceptualization, story development, and interface, character, and soundtrack, and level design.

Course Designation/Attribute: AP

Anticipated Terms Offered: Spring

This course focuses on the subject of game programming using a third party 3D game engine to provide a uniform integration for audio, 3D visuals, and device input. Students will learn various data types, structures, and collections as well as simple analysis of algorithms while developing with various game libraries to be implemented in multi-platform engines such as Unity and Unreal to produce platform independent code. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with the online game programming community to further develop their skills.

Prerequisites: GCPT 020 – Computer Programming Practices for Games 

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall

This course is to be taken by Game students enrolled in a Game Studio: Art, Audio, Design, Production or Programming section. The course is centered on an instructor guided project which may include serious games, simulations, artistic installations, entertainment, or new technological exploration. The course will provide a hands-on development environment for a formal interactive title to be released. Students will gain experience working as part of a game studio team with various departments, leads, development infrastructure, and real-world demands. Students are required to take this course multiple times during the course of their degree program. May be repeatable for credit.

Prerequisites:GAME 025 – Game Design Fundamentals or GAME 030 – Examining Play

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring

This course is the capstone course for the Context component of the interactive media curriculum and is thematically connected with the experience component. Students are required to link their humanities and social science work with their interactive media studies. Teams of students work on game projects that are designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The “serious” adjective generally refers to applications that have been designed for use by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics. These projects draw heavily on the outcomes students have mastered as a result of their general education courses.

Prerequisites: Two semesters of GAME 255 – Game Studio or Permission of the Instructor

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring

This course provides an overview of the field of artificial intelligence with special attention to uses in the electronic gaming field. Students will develop logic grids for intelligent agents, discuss how learning and communication are integral elements of artificial intelligence. Philosophical discussion of such concepts as intelligence, cognition, learning, and the Turing test will be addressed.

Prerequisites: GCPT 020 – Computer Programming Practices for Games or CSCI 121 – Data Structures

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall

The course will discuss optimization of 3 phases of game design development and production – marketing (how do we acquire the users?), retention (how do we keep and convert users to players?) and monetization (modeling the game changes to get the optimal monetization). The course will also discuss the Stochastic approach, introduce students to relational databases, statistical software and other analytical tools used in Game Analytics.

Prerequisites: GAME 025

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall

This course introduces students to strategies and methodologies to design, implement, and utilize in-game data collection points for analytics, statistics, and research data gathering. We discuss data modeling, research data collection, and data collection-design in relation to interactive media specifically, where understanding the goals of the final game analysis informs the development of the in-game collection as well as the selection and evaluation of the resulting datasets. Students will investigate and evaluate game title case studies, create datasets, design game variable suites based on research and model needs, while also learning how to implement data collection in game software and analyze collected data.

Prerequisites: GAME 255 – Game Studio or GAME 010 – History of Game Development or CSCI 121 – Data Structures or DSCI 125 – Introduction to Data Science or Permission of the Instructor

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall and Spring