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The gift that keeps on giving…
The popularity of the game ‘Doom’ not only positioned First Person Shooter genre as a breakthrough in video games, but it also brought forth and popularized a new game-programming model: the “game engine." This engine takes the library of core functions used in a game and morphs it into a modular, extensible and customizable design concept – so that gamers and programmers alike can modify the game's core to create new games with new models, scenery, and sounds, or put a different twist on the existing game material. The ability to build once and use often – especially those aspects that are the most popular – has made the term "game engine" standard verbiage in gamers' conversations!
This course will cover the various components involved with creating a game engine. Students will emerge with definitive answers to questions such as: where does the engine end, and the game begin; and what exactly is going on behind the scenes to push all those pixels, play sounds, make monsters think and trigger game events; essentially - what makes games go? What's in store is a deep, multi-part guided tour of the guts of game engines. |
