TR 3:05 4:20 ACSB VABL 1.303A (Art Annex, 2412 S. Closner) Emmett Tomai

Transcription

1 TR 3:05 4:20 ACSB VABL 1.303A (Art Annex, 2412 S. Closner) Emmett Tomai

2 Game development is a lot like every other kind of development Bad news if you were hoping it would be different Great news otherwise! Same technical challenges, interesting problems to solve Developing many of the same skills Not locking in to one career path Brilliant time for independent/hobby developers

3 1. Want to be a game developer? Make games. 2. Keep it simple The point of a game is an experience No players, no game Focus on the one thing that makes the experience 3. Community Read everything you can find Don t reinvent things Join, participate, contribute

4 Covers both design and development A lot to fit in! Goals: Introduce game development fundamentals 2d & 3d graphics, input, simulation, animation, media assets Practice the process Programming skills - design, coding and debugging Game design iteration, prototyping, play testing Teamwork communication, delegation, collaboration tools Make games That s what you re here for, right?

5 8 th year teaching, all at UTPA/UTRGV 5+ years prior industry experience (mostly web) Dissertation research on natural language understanding (AI) Narratives in particular Working in game environments Hobby and research game developer Need to listen more to important points 1 & 2 Created a lightweight research MMORPG, CS learning game Current project building a survival game for AI experiments

6 Life Grew up in Hawaii, college and beyond in Chicago Married 19 years 3 kids take up most of my time Church activities next Basketball, football, drumming, guitar, cooking Games! Manage to play online with my high school and college friends once a week (Destiny, Overwatch lately) Madden, Minecraft, StarCraft with my kids Far too much WoW back in graduate school Unusual board games! ( Currently: Pandemic, Forbidden Desert, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, BattleLore

7 Technical Tuesdays Here in our ACSB lab Introduce fundamentals Work through examples Hands-on practice with small labs Design Thursdays Together with the ART class Alternate meeting at Professor Sweigart s lab Art Annex (2412 S. Closner Blvd), room 1.303A Learning design principles and practices Participating in design exercises Working in teams to make games Weekly assignments on both!

8 2 Modules, each with a team game project Module 1: 2d simulation games All the basics Create a 2d mobile style game based on physical control and interactions Module 2: 3d games 3d engines from a high-level point of view Manipulating objects in 3d space (linear algebra!) Survey of advanced topics Artificial intelligence, networking, parallel computing Create a game using 3d and 2d techniques

9 Making a game is about finding out what is fun The only way to do that is to make it and put it in the hands of players Rapid development and iteration are critical! However, your games will not be graded on whether they are fun or not That would be both subjective and really hard Grading will primarily be about the process: design, implement, test, refine, repeat Technical challenge matters too

10 Required Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite with Ian Schreiber, Amazon: $10 digital, $24 paperback (free 2-day Prime) See Course Info page on website Lots of online resources!

11 Development Unity 3D, C# Laptops? GitHub Classroom, TortoiseGit (or SourceTree) Slack Course annoucements, teamwork Media Photoshop/GIMP, Illustrator/InkScape, etc. Audacity Blender, 3dsMax

12 Everyone is expected to participate All in-class activities Both game projects will be done in teams Everyone is expected to contribute Work together on campus, online tools as well You can choose your own teams You can t team up with the same person twice, so plan ahead The score of your project will be modified by the score of your contributions Everyone will have turns presenting ideas and updates to the class

13 All work will be submitted through source control (Git) Important industry collaboration tool Scores based on quality and timeliness of commits If you don t commit, it never happened Activity in team Slack channel also used as part of contribution measure 30% Labs and in-class activities 30% Game Project 1 40% Game Project 2

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