Game Design Courses

This course covers the broader aspects of the games industry such as its history, its current state and potential future evolution, and the team-based development environment. It then focuses on core game design concepts and their application as students create documentation and work in collaborative groups to develop analog games.

Like a good game, level design is easy to learn and difficult to master. There are many aspects to consider such as player ergonomics, flow, difficulty, boundaries, storytelling, tension, risk/reward, and game balancing. This course teaches you the basics, and helps you develop the requisite skills of good level design.

Techniques derived both from traditional illustrations, comic books, and the latest computer graphics software to create visual representations of characters, environments, props, and textures.

This course focuses on the core processes for making a game as a collaborative group. Learn valuable preproduction and documentation skills that go beyond the initial Game Design Document. Manage the project with schedules, milestones, and an iterative development process that includes intensive testing, version control, and effective communication strategies.

Game design is an interdisciplinary process of rapid prototyping and interactive design, and develop a practice for conductive playtests, critiquing design, and presenting work to others.

Explore games as systems to learn to solve increasingly difficult problems that require exploratory design and extensive testing to find a combination of mechanics that effectively solves each problem. Work individually and in groups to design, test, and build tabletop games.

This course continues the focus on core methodologies for collaborative game development. The interactive development process will be enhanced through online communication strategies, version control and a rigorous review process. In addition, students will gain a better understanding of the art pipeline for both 2D and 3D game engine environments.

The core skills learned in Level Design I are further refined and used to create a more immersive player experience. Advanced skills are taught such as controlling world physics, creating particle effects, building custom user interfaces, generating real-time camera effects, using post-processes to transform a scene’s aesthetic, and creating in-game cinematics.

This course introduces game theory concepts and critical analysis with a focus on European game mechanics.

This is the culmination course for collaborative game development methodologies. It is also the first half of the Capstone experience and incorporates several new preproduction tasks. Students will enter into a developer/publisher relationship with their faculty advisor and go through to the necessary steps to get their projects green lighted. Then they will utilize all of their skills to create a working game prototype that is ready for detail and polish.