January 2020 Course Information for January 2020
Time: MTR 9am-11:30am, 1pm-3:00pm
Place: Davis 301/Davis 1st floor
Instructor Information
Prof. Bruce A. Maxwell
Office: Davis 112
Phone: 859-5854
Office hours: Knock
Course Description
The course is about creating a game. We will we using the PyGame package built on SDL (Simple Direct Layer) to create the games. Along the way there will be short homework assignments that will help you to learn about game design. On Thursday afternoons of each week, your group will give a short presentation about your game design and implementation to the rest of the class. Over the course of the term, you should keep examples of work you do, whether or not it ends up in the final game design. These examples will form your portfolio at the end of the term, which should be a collection of work that you can show to demonstrate your efforts.
Textbooks
The Crawford book you can find on-line. It is a little dated, but the fundamental ideas of game design haven't changed much. The other textbooks are good quality texts on game design, if you are interested in continuing in the field.
Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design
Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design, 2nd ed.
Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
Useful Links
- Maxwell's Lecture Notes
- Daily Schedule
- Video Games and Gender, by Michele Zorrilla
- Women in Games International
- Pygame
- Pygame Documentation
- GIMP
- Csound
- itch.io indie games and free game assets.
- bfxr a sound effect creation system.
- First video games
- MOMA Video Game Exhibit
- Csound examples: explosion.csd, example.csd, notes.csd
- Reiner's tilesets
- Ari Feldman, Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics
- aseprite software for sprite creation (not free).