Department of Cognitive Science

Game Development I

88025 ARTS-4966-01
86953 COGS-4520-01
88225 COGS-4520-02
87225 CSCI-4520-01
Wednesdays 2PM-5:50PM
Troy 2012

Instructors: Marc Destefano and Silvia Ruzanka
Offices: Sage 3118 and West Hall G2
Email: destem [at] rpi [dot] edu and ruzans [at] rpi [dot] edu
Destefano's Office Hours: Mondays, 1 - 3PM
Ruzanka's Office Hours: Thursday, 2:30 - 5PM

Learning Outcomes: This class brings together software engineering and the arts to produce small real-time interactive video games. You will work with people outside your traditional discipline to create something that you could not create on your own. You will learn good software design practices, how to decompose large projects so multiple people can work on it simultaneously, and proper version control use.

Objective: Our objective is to give anyone who is interested in entering the gaming industry the skill set necessary to compete. Developing video games takes a myriad of talents: art, programming, design, and most importantly, the ability to work in a team and communicate with others.

Course Policies

Preparation and Attendance: Attendance is mandatory. You are a member of a team, and constant communication with your team is necessary. This class features an intense workload, as complete games are very difficult to make, and you'll be working within a highly compressed timespan. You will spend more time with your team outside of the classroom than within.

Academic Honesty: Student relationships are built on mutual respect and trust. Students must be able to trust that their teachers have made responsible decisions about the structure and content of the course and that they are conscientiously making their best effort to help students learn. Teachers must be able to trust that students do their work conscientiously and honestly making their best effort to learn. Acts that violate this mutual respect and trust undermine the educational process. They counteract our very reason for being here at Rensselaer and will not be tolerated. Any student who engages in any form of academic dishonesty will receive an F in this course and will be reported to the Dean of Students for further disciplinary action. The Rensselaer Handbook has defined various forms of Academic Dishonesty and procedures for responding to them. All of these forms are violations of trust between students and teachers. Please familiarize yourself with this portion of the handbook.

Gender-fair language: Because the way we speak and write affects the way we think, everyone in this course is expected to use gender-fair language in all discussions and writing. A guide to gender-fair language is available from the Writing Center and from the Library.

Grading: Your grade will be based on four projects that your team will complete over the course of the semester, with teams being re-arranged after each project. At the beginning of each class when a project is due, each team will give a short presentation of their game to the class. Afterwards, each team will get feedback regarding their work. Each team will hand in a short printed document indicating what work was performed by each member of the team, with the document signed by every member of the team. This record of work will be balanced against the quality of the project to determine each student's individual grade.

Milestone	Percentage of Grade
Project 1 (2D)	20%
Project 2 (2D)	20%
Project 3 (3D)	30%
Final Project (3D)	30%

Class Schedule (not cast in stone)

Aug 31	Introduction, Resources, Python tutorial
Sept 7	Pygame tutorial, Project 1 assigned
Sept 14	Studio
Sept 21	Project 1 presentations
Sept 28	Lua, Corona tutorial, Project 2 assigned
Oct 5	Studio
Oct 12	Project 2 Presentations
Oct 19	3D Game Art
Oct 26	Panda3D tutorial, Project 3 assigned
Nov 2	Studio
Nov 9	Project 3 presentations
Nov 16	Unity tutorial, Final project assigned
Nov 30	Studio
Dec 7	Final project presentations

Resources: You'll need the following software:

• Python - python.org (recommend v2.5.4)
• SciTE (optional) - scintilla.sourceforge.net
• Pygame - pygame.org
• Panda3D - panda3d.org
• Unity - www.unity3d.com

Recommended readings:

• The Game Artist's Guide to Maya - Michael McKinley
• The Game Animator's Guide to Maya - Michael McKinley
• Mastering Unreal Technology - Volumes I, II and III

Python cheat sheet
Pygame cheat sheet
Pygame tutorial graphics
Pygame tutorial code

Programmers - If you know C++, Python is easy to learn. You'll get over "the whitespace thing" very quickly. I recommend you read chapters 2-6 of Dive into Python to get started. Pay special attention to list slicing, list comprehension, and the differences between the __init__ method and a C++ constructor.

Artists - The way the pipeline will generally work is the following: While the models are being constructed, the programmers will use simple shapes to prototype the game mechanics. Once the model is built, rigged, and the UV map has been unwrapped, the model is then passed to the programmers for further prototyping. During this time the model is animated and textures, with the idea that the texture map can then simply be plugged into the game.

Project #1:

• Shmup
  • 3 different abilities
    
  • 3 different obstacles
    
  • 1 final challenge
    
  • 3-5 minutes of gameplay
    
  • Creative setting (e.g. sketches on a notebook

• Aesthetics:
  
  • Choose a visual style that fits with your game
    
  • In your writeup, include the motivations for your choices and how it helps the game experience.  These include the images, colors, fonts, and other visual decisions
    
  • Do the elements fit together in a coherent visual look?  for example, if you're going for a 16-bit retro style, then everything should fit with that look; similarly, the UI elements like on-screen text, score, meters, menus, should all fit with the game's look. 

Penguin graphic
Corona Device Build Guide
Notes on Lua
Penguin sample code

Project #2:

• Verb deck!
  
• Each team takes 3 cards, and before you leave today, choose 2
  
  • These are the central actions of your game
    
• Use at least one mobile-specific technology (GPS, accelerometer, etc.)

For 10/19:

• Download/Install Panda3D
• Create a student account with Autodesk and download/install Maya 2012 (64-bit)
• Put these MEL scripts (Dropbox | RPI) into Maya's script folder
• For Windows 7 64-bit users, merge the contents of this zip (Dropbox | RPI) into the /bin folder of one of your installations (I know, I know...)
• For Windows 7 32-bit users, the latest buildbot comes with maya2egg2012! Hooray!
• For Mac users, merge the contents of this zip (Dropbox) into your /Developer folder
• Panda tutorial skeleton code (change extension to .py)
• Optional: CrazyBump School Edition (Dropbox) License code distribution technique to be determined

Noah Schnapp's Boxman tutorial, Part 1

Panda tutorial files

maya2egg2012 command prompt instructions

Tagging collision objects in Maya

For 11/16:

Purchase the student edition of Unity Pro

Jesse's Unity package tutorial (Weapons! Particles! C#!)