in the intro class we could use Alice (it works on mac’s and pc’s) or Scratch (also works on both machines) to sort of act out their definitions of what’s a game - i think at each level there should be some production angle (kind of one of hte specialties at the park school) .
in the first design class (at the sophomore level) we’re going to use Game Maker (to make 2d games) and 3D Game Studio (to make 3d games - duh<G>)
Kevin Thornton talked about having some workshops about skinning and modeling and textures - that would be good at the freshman and sophomore level - learn some more tools
over in CS they’ll learn Flash and Java and some C++ in programming classes
at the 3rd level - where we specialize in types of games - they could use things like RPG maker and FPS maker to start off while playing with the concepts, and hopefully Metaplace will go public soon and we could use that to talk about building virtual worlds. Game maker can make multiplayer games - not massively multiplayer problably - but would be a good intro to some of the concepts for that specialty
Kevin Thornton talked about having workshops on a couple of different game engines - that would be good for the 3rd year folks
If we do a game jam weekend every year - we could introduce a new tool there too each time.
at the senior level - they could choose to use any tool they want for their final project
The goal is to be able to create games on a variety of platforms using a variety of software - to see what kind of game they want to make, to get some experience so they’re flexible in a small company, and to have a portfolio to back up their interest. They’ll have design docs and postmortems too for at least 3 games (soph, jr, and senior level) that should show them getting better at both the writing and the programming/game design
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