Upper-Division

Game writers create worlds, characters, and stories—and also craft computational systems so players can experience these fictions interactively. This course covers the fundamentals of authoring fictions and systems that work together toward powerful player experiences. All offerings support students with required synchronous section meetings.

Students work in teams to develop a template for a 10-week-long engineering design project. Teaches teamwork, leadership skills, inclusive team practices, Agile process, engineering ethics, and identity formation in engineers.

Guides small student teams through the performance of a quarter-long research project. Provides an overview of the process of performing research, research communities, and processes for finding and presenting research results.

Teaches the concrete programming and collaboration skills associated with making a digital game from start to finish, including but not limited to: establishing a team, concepting, storyboarding, prototyping, producing, and testing a game for release. Students are organized into groups and work together to create and produce a playable game.

Advanced game programming focused on software design patterns and refactoring. Introduces classic software design patterns, as well as game programming patterns. Introduces software refactoring, including code smells and widely used refactoring patterns.

Ten-week course to provide instruction on important business topics for videogame creators—many related to the games themselves and others for pursuing success in bringing the games to customers: publishing, distribution, marketing, funding, operations, and more.

Course introduces students to current and emerging advanced programming methods used in building complex, high-performance, and networked interactive media systems. Students use tools like debuggers and profiles to inspect and resolve software performance bottlenecks in a compiled language.

Introduction to construction of games using game engine technology, using a specific game engine as a focus. Covers major game engine features: input, collision, animation, model import, lighting, camera, rendering, textures, particle systems. Introduction to a specific game scripting language, custom game logic, game programming patterns. (Formerly offered as CMPM 121.)

Students develop skills and interactive prototypes for addressing three communication challenges: first, software itself communicating with interactors; second, developers of software communicating about the design of the software's interactions and users' experiences; and third, communicating results of design processes.

Theories and practices for approaching the design problems of interactive media holistically, beyond usability and accessibility. Includes hands-on learning, application of human-centered design and evaluation skills in group projects, and peer critique. This class is asynchronous online, with secondary sections offered as in-person meetings.

Practice-based interaction design studio course. Students learn about design-led approaches to Human-Computer Interaction through participating in group projects. Course offers introductions to design methods and actionable strategies to do interaction design work and design-led technology research.

Examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in games. Covers core AI technologies for search, control, and learning, and the application of AI to improve game design, development, and game play. Examines the AI content in multiple commercial games. This is an online class; most lectures are asynchronous. The weekly lab is synchronous, focused on Q&A and group discussion of work in progress.

Introduces generative methods for design. Uses algorithmic techniques to generate and evaluate game content (images, sounds, map designs) along with mechanics and progression systems. Search-based and learning-based techniques with connections to artificial intelligence are also covered.

Covers a range of design approaches and technologies including storytelling in games, interactive fiction, interactive drama, and artificial intelligence-based story generation. Through a mixture of readings, assignments, and project work, students explore the theoretical positions, debates, and technical and design issues arising from these approaches.

Introduces digital sound recording and editing technologies, sound synthesis, and concepts in sound design for media production. Covers the basics of sound capture, microphones, audio manipulation and editing, effects, sound formats, mixing and dynamics, synthesizers, audio software, and game audio.

Introduces compositional techniques and procedural audio as exhibited in the sound and music of video games. Surveys different styles of music implemented in video games and associated compositional approaches. Students develop skill in procedural audio via a series of workshops and assignments.

Surveys the relationship between music and data as exhibited in industry and research implementations of sonification and music information retrieval. Students introduced to various styles and algorithms of sound analysis and modeling and develop skills to program unique approaches in this area.

Introduces real-time, hardware-accelerated graphics programming suitable for game development, visual effects, and interactive multimedia projects. Emphasizes contemporary shader-programming techniques and developing custom effects using game engines and multimedia software.

Covers the graphic elements in computer games. Topics include modifying, optimizing, adding components, and building a game engine. Course evaluation based on exams and several programming projects, including a game built using the student's game engine.

Provides hands-on experience in using, designing, and building game engines. Students also explore different special effects, such as particle systems, spring systems, and game physics.

Surveys seminal and contemporary artworks and interactive installations that utilize and critically analyze new media, new technologies, and new algorithms. Students introduced to creative coding practices and encouraged to emulate existing digital arts techniques and to develop their own computational arts projects.

Working in multiple small teams, students practice multiple cycles of the interactive media design process. Cycles involve ideation, research, prototyping, release, and reflection. Students will understand how to follow the design process as a way to build knowledge, understanding, and empathy for a system’s users rather than just as a means to produce those systems. The course draws on design philosophies from inside and outside of the computer games industry. (Formerly Game Design Studio I.)

Students work in teams to create a fully-functional subset ("vertical slice") of an interactive, playable software system. Focus is on experience design, systems design, integrating assets (visual, auditory, and written), testing, and project management. May be repeated for credit. (Formerly offered as Game Design Studio II.)

Students work in teams to produce fully functional games based on previously developed game subsets. Focus on production including scaling, long-term player experience, teaching mechanics through interaction, developing multi-stage narratives/scenarios, and varying gameplay as players develop new understandings and abilities. Prerequisite(s): CMPM 171, or by instructor permission. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Formerly offered as Game Design Studio III.

Presents game design as the interplay of multiple interacting game systems. Surveys various game systems: movement, combat, reward, economic, logistics, quest, information visibility, narrative. Students explore systems via study, design, and play of board, card, and computer games.

Surveys tactical, structural, contextual, and other methods to enhance creativity and innovation in the design of games and other interactive media. Investigates strategies for creativity and innovation drawn from diverse fields, including interactive affordances, narrative and poetics, biology, contextual inquiry, and design research. To innovate in a field of fixed genres is challenging: the allure of modeling exemplars is strong. Although imitation can be successful in the marketplace, the most creative action occurs on the leading edge of change. Innovation benefits from strategies and methods that are directly aimed at exploring new perspectives and structures to learn through the process of discovery.

Students move through a rigorous design-research process involving skills and principles in human-centered design research as well as selected formal research methods. They learn to use tools for ideation, human-centered qualitative research, domestic probes, mock-ups, and prototypes.

Provides the opportunity to practice the creation of novel computer games. Students learn a new game-making technology, then create three games using this technology.

Allows students to explore topics in the computational media field and practice design in a wide variety of applications and areas, including but not limited to interactive computational experiences, AI and poetry, smart cities and game design, ethics and computational media, and computational media culture. Course presentation and assessment will vary by topic and instructor.

Provides a means for a small group of students to study a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

Provides a means for a small group of students to study a particular topic in consultation with a faculty sponsor. Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

Intended for majors. Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Intended for majors. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

For fourth-year students majoring in computational media. Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

For fourth-year students majoring in computational media. Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.