Interactive Media & Game Development Worcester Polytechnic Institute	IMGD

Presupposed background:

• CS-1101/2: Intro to Program Design (or the accelerated equivalent)
• CS-2102: Object-Oriented Design Concepts
• CS-2303: Systems Programming Concepts
• CS-3733: Software Engineering

Course Objectives:

The course is designed to give you an appreciation for the complexity involved in creating video games from the ground up. While playing video games has become very popular, actually building them requires developers to bring together various complex (and interesting!) technical pieces. As the bar keeps rising on game sophistication, it is more important than ever to apply sound software engineering and design principles, so that the level of software re-use and maintainabilty is increased.

It seems most game developers first got into the field because they found building games was at least as much fun as playing them. Hopefully you will feel this way too.

There are several objectives for this course:

• Understand the structure and design of modern game engines
• Understand the trade-offs between complexity, fidelity, and interactivity in game engines
• Gain proficiency digesting a very large, but well-structured, commercial game engine
• Extend the game engine in a non-trivial way to create a simple, "first-playable" version of a game
• Understand how to take a game-design document and implement the game as specified
• Use iterative design and development practices to create a playable game
• Understand how software engineering techniques can be applied to creating the parts of a game engine
• Gain experience and develop skills in working in teams on a software project of significant size, with a very short deadline
• Do some cool stuff!

There are many other things that must come together to make a successful game. Thankfully, you have four years, and a whole array of courses, within which to accumulate skills and experience in many of these.

Therefore, there are some things we won't be stressing in this course. The main ones include artistic skills, and traditional computer graphics skills. For the former, we have a sister course to this one called IMGD 3500: Artistic Game Development I, and for the latter there is a CS course called CS 4731: Computer Graphics.

Grading:

Attendance:

Projects:

Late Policy:

In-Class Work:

Office Hours:

Discussion Boards:

Lab Section:

General:

The IMGD lab (FL-222) can be used for this course, and the game engine code for the final project will be accessible from there.

Class Conduct:

Individual projects are expected to be done individually. As such, students are encouraged to discuss their work with each other, but are also expected to do the work by themselves.

Any breach of professional ethics as evidenced, for example, by copying exams or projects, downloading code from the Internet, cooperating in more than discussions and study groups, misusing computer resources, or using outside help of any kind, will be considered adequate reason for an NR in the course.

Group projects are designed so that every member gains a significant amount of new material. In the workplace, each team member is expected to contribute. Participants in group projects in this course should keep this in mind, and act accordingly. In evaluating each group, all team members will be asked to distribute a fixed set of "points" to the rest of their team, based on how much each member contributed.

It is to be emphasized that knowledge of material and professional behavior are tied together; failure in one of them negates any excellence in the other. Students who stay in the course past the first three days agree to adhere to the strictest rules of professional behavior.

The official WPI statements on Academic Integrity can be accessed at http://www.wpi.edu/offices/policies/honesty.html. Those who have any doubt about what that means, and fail to gain that understanding after a discussion with the instructor, are encouraged to drop this class. Remember this warning - any breach of ethics will earn you an NR.

Course Schedule:

Schedule for Office Hours:

Time	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
9:00
:30
10:00						Rob's Office Hours FL-B24a
:30
11:00
:30
12:00
:30
1:00		IMGD 3000 FL-320			IMGD 3000 FL-320
:30
2:00				IMGD 3000/3500 Lab FL-222
:30
3:00				Elliot's Office Hours FL-222
:30
4:00				Paulo's Office Hours FL-222
:30
5:00	Elliot's Office Hours FL-222	Paulo's Office Hours FL-222	Paulo's Office Hours FL-222
:30
6:00
:30
7:00
:30
8:00
:30

Main Web Resources

• GameDev.net
• Gamasutra
• C4 Game Engine
• Good intro to Game Scripting