Course syllabus
Course-PM
DAT510 / DIT414 DAT510 / DIT414 Design and construction of digital games lp3 VT22 (7.5 hp)
Course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering
Zoom Meeting Room Link
https://chalmers.zoom.us/my/paulinebelfordsmeetingroom
Contact details
- Pauline Belford, Course Responsible and Main Lecturer. Contact at pauline.belford@chalmers.se
- Michael Heron, Examiner. Contact at heronm@chalmers.se
- Arturs Umbrasko, Teaching Assistant. Contact at gusumbar@student.gu.se
- Geoffrey Chen, Teaching Assistant. Contact at chenge@student.chalmers.se
- Adam Rohdell, Teaching Assistant. Contact at rohdell@student.chalmers.se
Course purpose
Game development has become an important part of the modern digital economy. The industry is huge, diverse, and complicated. This course will provide a grounding in design, development and evaluation with the intention of giving students the necessary framework to create playable prototype games of their own.
Course literature
There is no required literature for this course. All required materials are provided during lectures and exercises.
Course Timetable
The course timetable is available in the calendar and in the summary below. Where there is a disagreement between TimeEdit and this page, this page is the one you should pay attention to. TimeEdit is a room booking system, not a scheduling system.
Student Representatives and Course Evaluation
- Information regarding the course evaluation process at Chalmers. (Links to an external site.)
- Information about being a student representative. (Links to an external site.)
These are the (randomly-selected) student representatives for this course:
TKITE adenholm@student.chalmers.se Hanna Adenholm
TKITE jo.hilmersson@gmail.com Joel Båtsman Hilmersson
TKITE emil@ekroth.se Emil Ekroth
TKITE hellner.vincent@gmail.com Vincent Hellner
TKITE rasmus.otterlind@gmail.com Rasmus Otterlind
Voluntary representatives can be added on request.
Learning objectives and syllabus
Learning objectives:
Knowledge and understanding
- Identify game accessibility issues and incorporate solutions
- Document a game design against budgetary and time constraints
- Identify an audience for which to design a game
Skills and abilities
- Design an experiential framework for a game
- Make use of standard game design frameworks
- Incorporate game assets
- Make effective use of game development frameworks
- Develop effective prototypes of a game design
Judgement ability and approach
- Effectively define success criteria against which a game should be assessed
- Analyze playability tests conducted with actual users
- Iteratively evaluate game goals against user feedback
Examination form
This course is divided into three successive parts. These parts cover design, construction and evaluation of games. The largest part will be given to game development in Unity or Unreal.
The first part is about the topic of game design. It will cover requirements gathering and specification: what do you want a game to do; for whom are you designing a game; and what does success look like? Students on this course will develop the design documentation for their own game as a deliverable for the first part.
The second part will take that design documentation and turn it into an prototype using Unreal or Unity. A playable demo of a game design is produced here.
The third part takes the prototype created in the previous part and focuses on playtesting. This will include ensuring accessibility for an audience that includes disabled gamers. Together those are the deliverable for the final part of the course.
Each part will also introduce theoretical concepts through lectures, academic papers, books, and professional literature.
Course summary:
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