Introduction to Game Development introduces students to the full game development process from conceptualization to publishing, and to the language common to game development environments. Students learn about the different roles on a game development team, with emphasis placed on teamwork, group problem-solving, and effective communication. Students also create a series of rapid game prototypes.

Students will be introduced to and familiarized with their roles as Game Programmers. The course explores the various disciplines and vocations within game programming, provides an overview of the skills that make a game programmer successful, and presents both industry and academic contexts for their duties. Through hands-on projects using modern game technology, students will gain practical experience in their craft.

This course takes a shaders-first dive into modern computer graphics programming. Students are introduced to vertex and fragment shaders, 2D and 3D coordinate spaces, drawing primitives, lighting and shading, data flow and manipulation, and modern GPU capabilities. Linear algebra and 3D math concepts will be refreshed and/or introduced for applicable topics.

Game Architecture explores components and subsystems of electronic games and their associated architectures. Topics include game state representation, time management, the main game loop and game subsystems. Game design and planning from first concept to start of development are explored in detail. In addition to game architecture, we will also look into the issues of game design, team building, and management. The focus will be on those implementations that work well, and will include situations to avoid and how to fix errors.

This course provides a technical introduction to the core concepts of artifical intelligence (AI). Students will be introduced to the history of AI, agents (agent architecture and multi-agent behavior), search (search space, uninformed and informed search, constraint satisfaction, game playing), knowledge representation (logical encoding of domain knowledge, logical reeasoning systems), planning (search over plan space, partial-order planning, practical planning), uncertainty and probability, learning (inductive learning, linear separators, decision trees, boosting, reinforcement learning), and perception and cognition (natural language, machine vision, robotics).

Students will gain a profound appreciation for the graphics pipeline by implementing 3D rendering tools, post-processing algorithms and industry-standard shaders. The animation side introduces mesh manipulation techniques, such as morphing and skeletal animation, using modern GPU-based algorithms. Linear algebra and 3D math concepts will be refreshed and/or introduced for applicable topics.

In EGD 420, Game Studio III, seniors successful in pitching their games during the college capstone in the Fall semester continue into full production. Forming large production teams, games are taken to the perfect polished state of gold master, ready for publication. Academic emphasis for the class is focused on working successfully in a professional studio environment, preparing for entrance into the job market, and taking personal craft to the next level.

Students learn the architectural, design and implementation strategies used to develop online games. They develop and stress test reliable and efficient protocols to address network latency (game lag), security and scalability requirements. Students will utilize distributed object caching along with these protocols to implement registration, authentication, server discovery and game lobby systems.