Introduction

The contents of this course are only a brief, and biased, summary of the excellent book Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. You are strongly advised to get a copy for yourself.

Pictures from Nikon Small World Competition.

Main Goals

• To know the main concepts of game development, tasks, techniques, problems and related methods.
• To build experience with specific tools, their models and workflows.

Course Basics

• Is the challenges process for the course assessment clear?
• Bibliography: Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber.

Game Design, an Overview

"So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?"

• Game Design is not Game Programming, see "The Door Problem".

• We are going to need one essential tool: the godot engine.

  • While other tools such as 2d/3d drawing software can be used, we'll try to avoid loosing focus.

Tasks

After installing the stable standard 64-bit version of godot, you must complete the following Getting Started tutorials from the documentation:

1. Introduction.
2. Step by step.
3. Your first 2D game.

Challenge

Use the godot engine to develop a turn based game.

• In a turn based game there are at least two players that play in turns.
• At any given time only one player can play.

• Think in turn based games you already know: tic-tac-toe, chess, etc.
• You can use one of the tutorial games as a starting point.

Consider these questions:

• What are the actions of each player?
• When does the game ends? What is victory?
• Is the game fun to play?