Videogame design and programming is one of the most exciting and challenging disciplines in Computer Science as it attempts to combine, in real-time, concepts in computer graphics, human computer interaction, networking, artificial intelligence, computer aided instruction, computer architecture, etc. In this course students will learn the basics of videogame design and the basics of videogame programming, attend specific seminars from field experts, and form project groups to design, build and demonstrate a simple video game. The course is structured as a series of lecture by the instructors and a series of invited seminars.

The goal of the course is to develop games. For this purpose, each student is require to submit a game proposal at the beginning of the course. All the proposals are collected and all the students can cast 5 votes for the proposals they like most. The game receiving the highest number of votes are the one that will be developed during the course.

The students who proposed the selected games are nominated as team leaders and have have around one week to build their development team which can consist at most of 5 students/programmers from the course and 1/2 external graphic designers.

There are two three main deadlines: (1) the prototype presentation, in mid December, when each team must demo the skeleton of their game; (2) the beta presentation, in mid January, when each team must demo an almost final version of the game; (3) the official public presentation, on January 27, 2012, when the students have to show their game to invited guests during a presentation open to the public (girlfriends, parents, friends, everybody is invited).

The official pages of the course are:

http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/

http://www.polimigamecollective.org

The games developed during the first edition of the course are available at http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/the-games/

The videos of the invited presentations during the first edition are available at the 2010/2011 course webpage http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/vdp2010

Awards etc.

• Weople one of the game developed last year won the Italian Microsoft Imagine Cup
• A Pixel Escape one of the game born during the course was one of the 20 finalists of the Microsoft 2011 Dream.Build.Play challenge. Check the game facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Pixel-Escape/
• Xenophonic has signed to be commercially distributed on iPad and iPhone
• Bad Blood (from 2011/2012) was the only Italian game in the first 100 selected for the Microsoft Imagine Cup
• Bad Blood also won the Share Care contest and received a special mention from Publicita' Progresso
• Bad Blood won the New Game Designer contest.

Course Structure 

• Course syllabus: Objectives, Final project and deadlines, Team building
• A brief history of videogames and current trends
• The structure of games (the designer view): Elements of Design, Story, flow, and interaction, Game play and player satisfaction
• The structure of games (the developer view): Defining games, Game elements, Engaging the player, Design methodologies
• Introduction to videogame development
• Game development tools
• Unity
• Game Intelligence
• Advanced Game Development: User interfaces, Audio and sound, Computer graphics, Networking

The final evaluation will be based on the game developed during the course. Each student is required to submit a game proposal at the beginning of the course. All the proposals are collected and all the students can cast 5 votes for the proposals they like most. The game receiving the highest number of votes are the one that will be developed during the course. The students who proposed the selected games are nominated as team leaders and have have around one week to build their development team which can consist at most of 5 students/programmers from the course and 1/2 external graphic designers. There are two three main deadlines: (1) the prototype presentation, in mid December, when each team must demo the skeleton of their game; (2) the beta presentation, in mid January, when each team must demo an almost final version of the game; (3) the official public presentation, on January 27, 2012, when the students have to show their game to invited guests during a presentation open to the public (girlfriends, parents, friends, everybody is invited); (4) a demo of the game must be published for free either on one of the course accounts on the Android/Win/IOS appstores or on the course website.