Concepts in Games Development (GamesDev)

Explore key ideas in game design, programming, architecture, game engines, player experience and game AI. There are lots of different skills that go into game development. This course is about key technical concepts in game development, and has been developed for people of many different backgrounds and skills. Some programming experience would be nice but is not required.

Presenter: Dr Clinton Woodward

Clinton taught himself to program at an early age so that he could write his own games, and he thinks everyone is like that!

Clinton has a background in applied science and biomedical engineering, a PhD in artificial intelligence, and industry experience in software engineering and data mining. He has worked as a lead software developer, researcher and consultant in various fields.

Delivery and support for this course

This free, online course is provided by Open2Study (www.open2study.com) and its nominated course provider.

Support services for all Open2Study courses are provided exclusively via the O2S student forums. To avoid undue delays in response, all student enquiries should be directed to Open2study via this method only. State Library Victoria provides access to this course as a service to our online visitors and has no direct involvement in the delivery, management or support for this course.

What's involved?

Module 1: Essentials of Game Design (8 videos, 7 quizzes, 1 assessment) 
Module 2: Making It Happen (9 videos, 8 quizzes, 1 assessment)
Module 3: Rules, Movement and Interaction (8 videos, 7 quizzes, 1 assessment) 
Module 4: AI for Games (9 videos, 8 quizzes, 1 assessment)

What will I learn?

• Essential game design elements and the role of a game designer
• Key game development stages and principles of agile game development
• How games are like magic and real-time systems
• That programming is made up of simple steps, and how procedure and object oriented programming can help us structure our game code
• How messages and events are key concepts in games at different levels within game architecture
• About graphs and other data structures that help represent game worlds and characters
• How a game design can be described, modelled and implemented as simple game architecture
• About the emergence of game engines and the relationship of games to other data-driven applications, including concurrent and distributed architectures
• How to implement games using iterative step-by-step processes, by selecting, implementing and testing
• That rules are central to games, and that game balance relates to fairness and bias for players
• How physics can be used to create realistic force-based movement, for individual characters and groups
• About AI techniques that can add interesting behaviour to game characters, including decision making, action planning and path planning

This course requires approximately 2–4 hours of study per week, but can vary depending on the student. This includes watching videos, and taking quizzes and assessments. The total video time for this course is 3 Hours 28 minutes.

If you pass this course you'll receive a Certificate of Achievement. While this certificate isn't a formal qualification or credit, you can use it to demonstrate your interest in learning about this area to potential employers or educational institutions.