Shaping the youth
I am going to be teaching game design at my former school Art Institure of Atlanta. In the land of the blind a one-eyed man is king!
Its going to be a special topics class on casual game design. I will be creating the curriculum from the ground up so I thought I would post here as I work on it.
What are Casual Games?
Yeah, this is a very sticky question but I will tune it for the class and the goals of the class.
The Rules.
There are many general rules that casual game live by. File size, commitment, etc. I also have many personal rules which could be boiled down to "be nice to your player."
Game Mechanics
My goal is to get the student to see that the core of game design is not just throwing out ideas. It's easy to say, "I have an awesome game idea, Zombie Chickens vs. Robot Monkeys," but its another task entirely to work out mechanics, levels, weapons, etc.
I want to use 2 exercises. One will allow students to come up with any mechanic. This should be something really focused. For example, a new weapon in an existing game, etc.
The second exercise will be a mechanic that fits a specific idea. Like the memory game I metioned in a previous post.
How Mechanics Create Dynamics
You need to predict how your core mechanics will be used. This helps you build around your core and also helps you find flaws in your designs.
Innovation vs. Polish
Students should understand how these two goals work with/at odds with each other.
more later...
Its going to be a special topics class on casual game design. I will be creating the curriculum from the ground up so I thought I would post here as I work on it.
What are Casual Games?
Yeah, this is a very sticky question but I will tune it for the class and the goals of the class.
The Rules.
There are many general rules that casual game live by. File size, commitment, etc. I also have many personal rules which could be boiled down to "be nice to your player."
Game Mechanics
My goal is to get the student to see that the core of game design is not just throwing out ideas. It's easy to say, "I have an awesome game idea, Zombie Chickens vs. Robot Monkeys," but its another task entirely to work out mechanics, levels, weapons, etc.
I want to use 2 exercises. One will allow students to come up with any mechanic. This should be something really focused. For example, a new weapon in an existing game, etc.
The second exercise will be a mechanic that fits a specific idea. Like the memory game I metioned in a previous post.
How Mechanics Create Dynamics
You need to predict how your core mechanics will be used. This helps you build around your core and also helps you find flaws in your designs.
Innovation vs. Polish
Students should understand how these two goals work with/at odds with each other.
more later...
posted by Brad Merritt at 12:56 PM
4 Comments:
Hey this is Burton, formerly known as that guy that used to serve you your iced latte with 1 pump... now known as the guy who only works and goes to school. Anyways, just wanted to say that your class sounds fun and that I would like to take it, but will be fully loaded on class and an internship. Might give us more opportunities to discuss games and "things of this nature" when you aren't globetrotting.
My advice and pretty much a plea to your teaching endeavor is to help the students to understand what it takes to get a job in the industry. A lot of game design students (not all, but a good percentage) screw around and play games a bit much. Anyways, having said that, I need to get to my work for the night. Take care Brad!
This is Patrick from the game design class (the guy who wanted to port street fighter). Stoked about the class man! hey is your email in the syllabus? had a couple questions. One thing that was brought up the other day in class was Flash only being able to do so much with 3D and stuff like that. I think it would be totally sick if they just got M$ to throw them some fat wads of cash, and in turn they get to have the DirectX / OpenGL API be usable in flash. On top of that, they could incorperate all the shader model technology so theorectically someone could port something like Doom 3. Why don't companies embrace crap like that more often? Anyhoo, see you in class thursday.
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I am really happy to hear you are excited about the class.
I guess using Direct X is a big trade-off. Right now the Flash plug-in is very small and has no cross-platform issues. Direct X would be very Microsoft specific and greatly increase the download time. For a while Microsoft was working on a "Flash killer" application but I never saw anything released. Maybe that has something to do with it too?
I am pretty sure my email is in the syllabus. I will double check and update the syllabus on classbot if its not there. See you Thursday
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