CSC 482 - Advanced Computer Game Projects

Catalog Description:

Principles of computer game development with emphasis on 3D first-person game engines. Topics include: advanced character behavior control, procedural content generation, large scale mulit-player game design and infrastructure, serious games for education, training and other applications, the game production pipeline and project built on top of a commercial game engine. Consideration of the game production pipeline, including project pitches, requirements and design detail. Programming project with written and oral reporting is required. Enrollment open to CSC majors only.


Contact Hours: Prerequisites: CSC 481
Co-requisites: None
Restrictions: None
Coordinator: Dr. David Roberts
Textbook: None

Course Outcomes:

By the end of the course, students should be able to accomplish the following:
  1. Delineate issues in techniques for game development including NPC navigation, service-oriented architectures for game control, AI behavior, motion gaming, mobile game development and other technologies used to create a sophisticated computer game.
  2. Discuss the concepts and apply the skills needed to formulate novel game concepts, scope game development milestones and implement a complete game built on top of an existing 3D gaming engine. This will involve (a) Defining feature sets consistent with game engine capabilities that facilitate an overall user experience; (b) Preparing documentation indicating estimated timelines for project development and revising schedules (with faculty supervision) as projects progress; (c) Allocating responsibilities to team members and managing the interaction between dependent subsystems.
  3. Develop and present oral game proposals (“pitches”) that involve team presentation and in-class peer and instructor critique.
  4. Compose effective game design documents and manage a semester-long game development project working from those specifications.
  5. Contribute to a development team constructing a stand-alone interactive software artifact using a) code repositories and source code access control, scheduled reviews and graded milestones and in-class demonstrations.
  6. Provide end-of-project overviews and hands-on demonstrations of stand-alone, playable games for each semester project, as well as access via the web for each game as downloaded, self-installing mod files for public access.


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