Computer Game Programming (Fall, 2020)

TR 9:50-11:10AM via Zoom (link in calendar invite; if you don't have the calendar invite, ask via e-mail)

Taught by Jim McCann (Virtual Office Hours by appointment -- just e-mail!)

We use Piazza for discussion and announcements.

Games

In this class, we made a bunch of small games, which you can see here:

• List of small games

We also produced seven final games, which are linked below. You can also check out the trailer.

• Enviro, a barrel-pushing, tile-based puzzle game.
• PlayComet, a comet-flying game.
• Conquer, a two-player territory-capture game.
• Hexapus Jump!, a 3D platforming game.
• Wing Person, a co-op visual novel with platforming elements.
• Magic Castlevania, a rouge-like 2D platformer.
• Color Space, a color-changing top-down shooter.

Course Goals

Computer Game Programming will help you build the programming skills needed to turn ideas into games. This means we'll be covering both runtime systems and the asset pipelines to fuel them, along with some game-design exercises (with an eye to thrifty code).

The philosophy of this course is to learn by building games, from (nearly) the ground up -- this means lots of C++ and OpenGL hacking, a smattering of scripting (shell, python, javascript, lua), and a lot of documentation-reading. You do not need to be an expert in any of these things, but it would help if you are familiar with C++ and the modern OpenGL (3.3+) API.

Previous years with similar content: Game Programming '19, Game Programming '18, Game Programming '17, Game Programming '09.