It’s about quality, not quantity. Quality assurance is vitally important to the production and publication of video game software. In this course, you’ll learn how to work with specific established paradigms of testing created by software companies and to conduct an in-depth analysis of software at various points in the development cycle. You’ll address specific problems created by software interactivity testing, including those of bug identification and tracking. You’ll also have the exciting opportunity to work with professional software developers to assure and improve product quality throughout numerous testing phases.

Don’t just play games – learn how to create them. In this project-based course, you’ll gain a hands-on understanding of video game development from concept and proposal to design and production. Video game industry leaders will act as guest lecturers throughout the semester to help keep real-world application and interest top-of-mind. You’ll be introduced to various software tools that are key to creating exciting 3D worlds, including level design, character and background modeling, textures and animation.

Without the art and animation, it’s game over. Acquire the tools you’ll need to bring a video game to life, including 3D modeling, texturing, polygon count and rigging. In this course, you’ll be exposed to a wide range of components and techniques that fall under the umbrella of 3D assets, including various modeling techniques, lighting, baking, surface maps, and particle systems. By the end of the course, you’ll have developed the necessary skills to animate a sequence that will be used in a video game engine!

You’ve played ‘em, now make ‘em. Roll up your sleeves and create a 3D game based on Microsoft® DirectX®. In this project-based class, you’ll build a simple game from the ground up, learning various approaches to game play logic as well as gaining a thorough overview of collision detection, game physics, 3D mathematics, artificial intelligence, and the 3D graphics pipeline. You’ll come up with the idea, then design and program it for the console of your choice in DirectX/Open GL. By the end of the course, you’ll have a solid understanding of what it’s like to be a video game programmer as well as the fundamental tools necessary to develop your skills further.

The mobile gaming market is exploding! Mobile games are portable, ubiquitous, networked – and the wave of the future. In this course, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of the current cutting-edge gaming products for platforms involving anything handheld, including cell phones, PDA’s and Pocket PC’s – and how to use this current console expansion to add components like messaging and cameras directly into your game design. You’ll also learn how to develop mobile games for the portable platforms of your choice, such as Nintendo, Gameboy, Sony PlayStation, etc. Learn how to develop interactive media for screens that may be small, but have lots of creative potential.

In this intermediate course, you'll examine the design and production aspects of creating successful video games. You'll also explore the business side of video game production, learning what it takes to design, manage, and produce your game. As a course project, you'll create your own design documents for an original game, and discuss which elements can lead to success and which can sometimes lead to failure in the competitive video game market.

When you’re ready to bring your skills to the next level, this is the course that can take them there. An advanced media management course and advanced project course in one, you’ll choose the project you want to create – then spend the rest of the semester developing it. Working either alone or in a group, you’ll learn to meet important deliverables such as the timeline, storyboard and art components. Through the media management portion of the course, you’ll learn how to manage your project by creating a budget, determining human resource needs, selecting talent, motivating your team, maintaining deadlines, and delivering a final result that meets or exceeds client expectations.

Do you aspire to be artificially intelligent? In this course, you’ll get an overview of the exciting concept of artificial intelligence in video games. Focusing on path finding and path traversal, you’ll have the opportunity to design and implement a complete pathing system using a pre-existing game framework. Topics covered will include actor formations, obstacle avoidance, finite state machines, real-world pathing complications, and Team AI.

What’s a game without cool graphics? Learn the latest trends and techniques for creating real-time 3D graphics that will give you the power to design the most dynamic context for your game. This course is designed so students at all levels of programming expertise will be challenged to produce exciting work. Complex topics like data structures and algorithms are broken down into easily digestible portions. Designing simple arrays and bit vectors will progress to binary tree graphs, hash tables and rendering techniques. By the end of the course, you’ll have developed a one-minute graphics project that will be suitable for submitting on a demo reel to professional studios.

It’s no fun playing alone! This course introduces you to the tools and techniques you’ll need to make multiplayer games function seamlessly online. You’ll gain a solid understanding of interactivity theory and implementation as you’re led through the process of creating a fully functional online game, complete with a platform-independent network library and back-end database. For professional insight into online game development and design as well as various approaches to creating compelling interactivity, interviews with industry leaders will be examined.