Instructor
| VIU Profile: | Dr Russell Campbell |
| Email: | Russell.Campbell [at] viu [dot] ca |
| Office: | Nanaimo Campus, Building 315, Room 218 |
Email me to set up a time for discussion on Zoom if needed.
Schedule
The following plan for weekly topics, project milestones, assignments, and labs is only a draft and is subject to change.
| Week | Topic |
|---|---|
| Sep 7–11 | course overview, devOps, project management, CI/CD, game-studio workflows |
| Sep 14–18 | prototyping, randomness, procedural design, worley noise, combinatorial searches, chaos theory, butterfly effect |
| Sep 21–25 | fundamentals of visual design, 12 Principles of Animation, positive vs. negative space, scripting and addons in Blender/Unity |
| Sep 28–Oct 2 | creative writing, brainstorming, natural-language processing, collecting/journalling, interactive narrative |
| Oct 5–9 | primitive data types and optimizing calculations, Boost, graphics pipeline, threading, hi-res timer, asynchronous file I/O |
| Oct 12–16 | low-level rendering, scene graph, culling, level of detail (LOD), binary space partitioning trees |
| Oct 19–23 | player mechanics, cameras, compositing, intelligent agents, physics engines, simulation |
| Oct 26–30 | game worlds, and maps; 2D sprites, and tiles; 3D modeling, animation, texturing, topology; GPU programming (Vulkan) |
| Nov 2–6 | audio, mixing, ambience, reverb, effects/filters, 3D audio, music |
| Nov 9–13 | (study week) |
| Nov 16–20 | networking for multiplayer, logging, security, unit testing, debugging |
| Nov 23–27 | graphical user interfaces, head-up displays, localization, accessibility, law |
| Nov 30–Dec 4 | marketing, community support, publishing, investing |
| Dec 7–11 | pitches, pitch documents |
Project
- Sep 7–28 Milestone 1 (game prototypes and propose your main project)
- Sep 28–Nov 2 Milestone 2 (mechanics complete, placeholder content only for a working demo)
- Nov 2–Nov 30 Milestone 3 (debugged, procedural/hand-crafted content)
- Dec 7–Dec 11 Presentation (~10 minutes, pitch as if to AAA studio/platform stakeholder)
Assignments
- Sep 14–25 Assignment 1 (procedural graphics, level design)
- Oct 5–23 Assignment 2 (optimizations, culling, BSPTs)
Labs
Each week will have a lab (~10 total), EXCEPT for the following weeks:
- Sep 7–11 (no lab)
- Nov 9–13 (no lab)
- Nov 30–Dec 4 (no lab)
- Dec 7–11 (no lab) (no lab)
Content of labs will support weekly topics, assignments, and project work. You will receive a mark for completing, so it is to your advantage to try, explore concepts, and even share what you discover with others in the class.