Course syllabus

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Course-PM

DAT510 / DIT414 DAT510 / DIT414 Design and construction of digital games lp3 VT25 (7.5 hp)

Course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering

Zoom Meeting Room Link

https://chalmers.zoom.us/my/paulinebelfordsmeetingroom 
NOTE: We do not intend to hold any classes via Zoom. This link is here in case any students need to join a mandatory supervision meeting via Zoom, for example.

Discord Server

You are encouraged to join the design-and-construction-of-digital-games channel on the N2GDT Discord server. You can use this channel to find group members, and to discuss various things related to the course. The Discord server is moderated, so be mindful of what is posted there. The link is: https://discord.gg/hzrSBSNAE3 

Supervision Meetings Schedule
Meet in Jupiter 044 at the beginning of the class. The staff in Jupiter 044 will have a note of which supervisors are in which rooms.

Supervision Meetings Schedule can be found here: GroupAllocations2025.docx

Unity Version

This course makes use of Unity. The version we are using is 2022.3.47f1 LTS. There is a word document publised in Module 2 which shows where to find this and how to install it on your personal computers. Please use this version if possible. If you use Unity 6 (which was very recently released) there are major differences between it and previous versions and support cannot be guaranteed.

Teaching Team and Contact details

  • Pauline Belford, Examiner and Main Lecturer.  Contact at pauline.belford@chalmers.se
  • Natasha Mangan, Lecturer. Contact at natashab@chalmers.se
  • Aristos Anthopoulos, Teaching Assistant
  • Suvrangshu Barua, Teaching Assistant 
  • Andrej Erdelsky, Teaching Assistant
  • Raul Martin, Teaching Assistant
  • Alexandre Monteiro, Teaching Assistant

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

These are the (randomly-selected) student representatives for this course:

Chalmers

TBA

GU

TBA

 

Please email me to volunteer as a course rep from GU.

Voluntary representatives can be added on request. We always seek to get at least a couple of representatives from GU, as it is only Chalmers who sends a list of representatives.

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

Chalmers Syllabus

GU Syllabus

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.

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. 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:

Date Details Due