GAME 285 - Advanced Topics in Game Development

SPRING 2025:

SEC 01 TABLETOP AND FANTASY CARD GAME ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN

This course focuses on illustrating and designing artwork for collaborative Tabletop and Fantasy Card Games. Illustrate and design full color works of art based on common elements, tropes, and archetypes found in these heroic games of adventure. Coursework will place emphasis on creating representational art that combines figures, objects, and environments. Assignments will teach you the process of planning and building artwork that tells a story from the ground up using compositional elements, clearly defined preliminary drawings and color images that exhibit punch and impact.

SEC 02 CONSTRUCTION OF ROLE-PLAYING GAMES FOR TABLE-TOP

Students will spend this course discussing the history of table-top role-playing design, the different systems of action resolution and action cycles available to games, how role-playing games represent a character’s growth and development, and how game systems support different types of storytelling and character design. Students will review different game languages, create and propose a game concept, choose a system language and design a game system, and conduct testing sessions for character creation and play.

SEC 03 2D ART

This course offers an exploration of advanced 2D art techniques essential for game design, focusing on core elements such as proportion, perspective, and the effective use of light, shadow, and color in character and environment creation. Through hands-on projects, critiques, and team-based assignments, students will develop their visual storytelling abilities and apply these skills to produce dynamic, visually engaging artwork, showcasing their progress and building a strong foundation for a professional game art portfolio. This course may include a cross-cultural project, where students collaborate with peers from international game design programs. This collaboration encourages students to integrate diverse cultural elements into their designs, enriching their creative process and preparing them for the global landscape of the game industry.

SEC 04 NARRATIVE DESIGN

This course will cover the techniques and strategies of narrative design. Students will learn the elements of storytelling and character as well as how they are used specifically throughout the course of a game. Students will learn about and assume the tasks and duties of a narrative designer. Once students gain an understanding of these topics, they will undertake the responsibility of designing and writing their own narrative-driven game.
 

FALL 2024 TOPICS:

SEC 04 DRAGONS: ART & LORE, FROM ASIA TO THE WESTERN WORLD
Dragons have appeared in numerous fantasy stories from The Hobbit to Game of Thrones.  This course focuses on the historical and cultural representation of Dragons in the visual arts and folklore.   Coursework emphasizes the development of both illustration and writing based on common elements found in these legends.  

SEC 03 CLASSIC CONSOLE DEVELOPMENT
In this course, students will experiment with what it is like to develop games for a traditional environment like the Nintendo Entertainment System, as contrasted with the high-resolution, high-memory consoles and PCs we use today. Skills will include setting up a custom toolset to compile and link for this vintage platform, creating and importing low-colorspace spritesheets, writing code within tight processor and memory constraints, and understanding the architecture of a minimal computing environment. Students will build games and test playing them in an emulator environment.

SEC 04 NARRATIVE DESIGN
This course will cover the techniques and strategies of narrative design. Students will learn the elements of storytelling and character as well as how they are used specifically throughout the course of a game. Students will learn about and assume the tasks and duties of a narrative designer. Once students gain an understanding of these topics, they will undertake the responsibility of designing and writing their own narrative-driven game. 

 

Prerequisites: Established per Topical Section

Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall & Spring