Having completed the course the students will be able to:
Create a computer game prototype by applying experience with games, theoretical understanding and technical skill.
Understand the process of designing, and developing a game (in this case a multiplayer role-playing game).
Understand what games are from a theoretical perspective. They will be able to analyse and do academic critique on games.
Describe the principles and practice of game design, focusing on multiplayer games of various sorts.
Discuss aspects related to the game development process.
Generally: To learn the process of coming up with, discussing, and documenting game ideas.
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In this course, the class will create an online multiplayer game in the role-playing game genre. This takes place by reading game design literature and general computer game theory, looking at existing games, and using these as input for our game design.
The practical side of the course deals with designing a computer game from scratch but implementing it using existing tools.
The class will in conjunction define the content of the game, document it, and implement it in an existing system. We will then use external playtesters to comment on the game and learn to modify the game according to the external input.
The class will decide the content of the game. As a point of inspiration, the teachers suggest that we start with a well-defined goal:
We can begin by looking at a focus group (children, pensioners, people like us, people who don’t normally play games, etc.), a mood (a game that makes people cry, techno, spleen etc..), an existing game (Cluedo, EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dungeons & Dragons etc..), an existing story (Kafka, Matrix, Dostojevski, Usual suspects, Star Wars, Hamlet, Camus etc..).
We will focus on: how to work with raw ideas, game proposals (documents, planning, scheduling), genre-specific issues, immersion, interactivity (actions and gameplay), the interface (setting, time, space, characters, etc), tools, the AI, levels, playtesting.
For the technically interested: we will use a Java-based system for creating graphical multi-user worlds. The client runs in a browser. The server-side stores all world and player information in an SQL database.
Programming skills can come in handy in terms of scripting (using a JavaScript syntax) and Java programming (to create custom objects in the game world).
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