Games Programming
First year of Games Programming
This full-time course is designed to prepare graduates for a job in the industry of games development. It teaches the student excellent programming skills and a broad knowledge about the games pipeline, history and experience in producing high quality and reusable content and engines. This course provides hands-on training in industry standard software, programming languages and development environments. Students are trained in game design and writing game design documents, storytelling and scriptwriting, mathematics and physics for programming and games for all consoles. In addition students acquire important inside knowledge about the industry during the course.
Graduates of the first year obtain a Diploma and are prepared for entry-level work in the games of animation industry in positions such as (junior) programmer, game designer, tool programmer, etc. Graduates have learned to work with industry standard hard- and software and will have a broad knowledge about games, the interactive entertainment pipeline and the industry of games production. For more advanced skills students can continue on to the second year in order to attain a Bachelor Degree.
Main modules covered during this course:
- Principles of 3D Modeling:
Provides students with an understanding
of 3D modeling and its place in the multimedia and interactive
entertainment environment. Introduces students to current
tools, principles and practices for the efficient creation, transformation
and editing of 3D objects.
- Object Oriented Programming:
Introduces the student to the
fundamentals of programming and develops an understanding of
procedural programming and object oriented programming techniques used in the field of applications development.
- Concept and storywriting:
Provides students with the skill to create
and write a story using fully realized characters. These skills can be
put in practice in film as well as in game animation and programming
and are the basics for creating exciting and appealing interactive
entertainment.
- Design for Interactive Entertainment:
This module focuses on
the fundamental issues behind the design of electronic interactive
entertainment applications. It introduces the principles of game
theory, basic interactive design, rule design, level design and more
practical aspects such as design documentation, testing and the
game development business.
- Games Programming I:
Extends students’ knowledge gained from
the module ‘object oriented programming’ into the field of games
development. Develops intermediate to advanced skills with object
oriented programming: students will learn the structure and development
processes required to make simple 2D games.
- Scripting and Storyboarding:
Provides the students with skills
and concepts to develop complex scripts and storyboards for
many media. Examines traditional elements such as tone, pace,
flow, tension, beginning, middle, end, equilibrium, protagonist,
problem, sub-plots, climax, resolution and style and the challenge
of applying these to interactive media.
- Interactive animation:
Gives the students the opportunity to study effective game level design in a variety of genres and export and test some of these levels for playability. Explores aspects of game level design, examines strengths and weaknesses of existing games and students create their own templates.
- Mathematics of Games Programming:
Provides students with
a foundation in three dimensional mathematics and physics. Introduces
matrix mathematics and the dynamics of moving bodies
with respect to the impact of physics to games programming.
- Digital Audio & Video Production:
This module provides students
with knowledge of the digital audio and video production
process and introduces them to the fundamental methods used in
digital audio and video for new media.
- More topics like:
Games programming 2, shaders, exporting,
etc. are covered in other modules during the course. Content is
subject to change.
*Second year of the Games Programming Course