Description (4 Units)

This course will cover the various components involved with creating a game engine. 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 modular, extensible and customizable design concept allowed gamers and programmers alike to 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 term "game engine" has come to be standard verbiage in gamers' conversations. 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.