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Overview

This is my first attempt to find a structure for the tangle of topics connected to digital games:

• Art and design [not in this course]

• Game design, ludology, funology

  • Genres

  • Game mechanisms

  • Serious games (e.g., education, persuasion) 1

• Software engineering

  • Production workflow 1

  • Asset reuse

    • Asset management 1

    • Asset transformation 1

  • Division of labor

    • Designers, programmers, testers (e.g., shaders, scripting)

    • End-user development (e.g., modding)

  • Software organization: Engines 1 [Hexagonal Tiles]

  • Testing

    • Functional testing

      • Automated testing

      • Instrumented code

      • Manual testing

    • Evaluation with users

      • Questionnaires, interviews, observations

      • Statistical methods [Legibility]

• Computer Graphics

  • Modeling 1

  • Texturing, shading [Normals]

  • Low- to mid-level Animation

    • Hand-made [Bone Weights]

    • Motion Capture 1 2 3

    • Motion synthesis 1

    • Physics 1

  • Behavior (NPCs): Game AI

    • State machines [Statecharts]

    • Path finding

  • Rendering [Wrinkles and Hatching] [Road Signs] [GPU Roads]

• Sound and music computing

  • Adaptive music

  • Noise generation (e.g., footsteps, sound textures)

  • Mixing

• High-performance computing

  • Multi-core programming (e.g., multithreading, CELL)

  • GPU programming

• Distributed systems (multiplayer, mobile)

  • Latency and packet loss

  • Cheating and fraud

• Human-computer interfaces

  • HCI principles (for games?)

  • Prototyping

  • Evaluation

  • Input and output devices (e.g., via haptics 1 2, [Accelerometers])

• Sociology, psychology, law

  • Addiction

  • Violence

  • Censorship

• Business

  • Structure: hardware manufacturer, developer, publisher

  • Distribution channels (e.g., mail-order, mobile download)

  • Earnings and expenses; risks

  • Marketing

  • In-game advertising

Some ideas for mini-projects in this course:

• Motion capture with Natural Point OptiTrack, review for magazine

• Haptic interaction with Novint Falcon, review for magazine

• Diagrammatic programming of NPC behavior

• Cinema 4D or XSI or Maya game production plug-in programming

• Strange uses for AGEIA PhysX, e.g., a mechanical computer

• Composition/production helpers for adaptive music

• GPU programming: applications of Shader Model 4

• A herd of IR-controlled small robots (four are available) as output “device”

• Visibility estimates for efficient rendering (occlusion culling)

• Threading helpers

• Using the CELL BE

• (your idea here)

Some of these ideas require basic fluency in C++. I can offer a crash course.