What is a game?: What is a game? What are the defining features of games? Let’s think about this and a few related issues.
History of Games: A brief history of gaming from the 1970s through today. A brief discussion of how the design of games has changed over the years.
Let’s Play Super Metroid: No slides for this one.
Let’s Play Celeste (with Ryan Kann): No slides for this one.
MDA: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics in games. Let’s start formalizing our discussion of how games are organized, designed, and discussed.
Formal Elements of Games: A discussion/breakdown of the formal elements of games.
The Game Loop: Short introduction to the game loop, frames per second, dealing with time in games, etc.
Sprites and Transforms: Discussion of Sprites, their properties, coordinate spaces and converting between them, and affine transforms in games.
Display Hierarchy: Discussion of display trees and how transforms are used to create hierarchical behavior in games.
Character Design: Short discussion regarding character controls and programming.
Enemy Design: Description of designing enemies and NPCs using state machines.
Collision Detection: The basics of detecting and resolving collisions in games.
Events: Software design of event systems and how they relate to game development.
Level Design: Ruminations on the design of levels with examples.
Actions and Interactions: Actions and interactions in games.
Game Balance: Overview of reinforcement/feedback, stability, and how to balance games.
Randomness: Overview of how randomness plays a role in game design.