A crash course in game design and production
Hi all!
Before I disappeared 4 years ago, I was teaching a course on the old
Euphoria mail list in game design and production. I stopped getting
feedback from it, and I figured people lost interest. And it was
discontinued at the end of the theory section, before we really got started
coding the course project, which was to be really cool 2 player pacman game
with with lots of cool bells and whistles.
Anywho, I've been in a pacman mood lately, and I thought it would be fun to
start up the course again, assuming anyone on here was interested in
learning how to create computer games from vague idea through finished
production.
Anyone interested?
The course starts by teaching what goes into a complete design
specification, and how to write one, specifying in gross detail the "design"
of your game, including General Description, characters, backstory, screen
and interface design, feedback systems, art and sound design, programming
paradigm, AI strategies, etc. By the end of the lesson 7, you'll know
pretty much everything you need to know to start writing code for your game.
I cover how computer graphics and computer sound works, both theory and
application and how and what we need to do for a game project.
After that we choose what include files we need to make our job easier, and
specifically which routines we need from them and what they need to do what
we want to do. Then we plan our data structures, and layout our variable
table. Then we write code for loaders, display, and engine things that put
things on the screen and move em around. Then control procedures,
housekeeping procedures, etc. and we continue through to a finished,
thoroughly plattested and debugged(as much as possible!) quality game.
Once we get through we'll not only have a cool playable game that we created
from scratch using stratight Euphoria and some off the shelf libraries, but
also a core game engine that we can use to create other games.
The course will go via email. I send out one or two installments per week
and we send questions and answers back and forth. All participants will
share ideas, code, art, etc., and will help playtest everybody's game.
Even if you're not a "game" person, the design and production emphasis of
this course will help you doing any kind of software production.
If you're interested, drop me an email at the address below. We need at
least 5 people to make this a go.
Something fun is just around the corner!
Michael Packard
pastor at BeRighteous.com
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