ATLS 4519 / 5519

Course Description

An intensive three week studio where students will ideate and prototype three games, one over each week of the course. This class is modeled on Game Jams, where students will be given a theme, constraint, or platform each week on which to draw inspiration. By working on making more games, and making them quickly, students will improve their rapid-prototyping skills.

One of the best skills that we can have as Game Designers is prototyping. Learning techniques to quickly test our ideas helps us to improve and expand on those ideas. This course will force students to work as efficiently as possible, leaning on rapid-prototyping techniques to quickly explore concepts, host play-testing sessions, and eventually bring these ideas to a final playable digital prototype at the end of each week.

Course Objectives

Students who successfully complete this course will:

Critical Thinking & Theory / History:

• Continue to learn about the history of games
• Examine existing games, and learn about their development process

Design/Creative:

• Design game prototypes to test big ideas
• Develop their skills in paper prototyping
• Exercise ideation skills to explore new game possibilities

Technical:

• Strengthen their skills in rapid-prototyping
• Explore a variety of smaller game development environments for exploring ideas
• Program game prototypes in various languages (C++, C#, Lua, Python, JavaScript)