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.

Extending the content and concepts learned in ITP 391, you delve deeper into the narrative aspects of video games, the roles of perspective, and the roles of visual elements as story telling devices. As a team, the class develops a complete working video game level, using a game designed in ITP 391. Through this process, you will learn time management, delegation, task management, asset management, as you develop important teamwork skills.

The best games are those that bring people together. The connected networked world lets people play with others anywhere on the planet, as if they were in the same room. For new games to be successful, the social component must be exploited in a manner that fosters community-building. In this course, you'll examine numerous social games and analyze how they build community, with a view towards creating successful social games of your own. You'll participate in class explorations of online games, critiquing their use of in-game chat, player matching, party invites, leaderboards, transactions, contests and promotions, and discussion forums. You'll also have a chance to meet guest speakers from the world of social game development.