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Course Outline
Week of 8 January – Week of 16 April, 2018
Mondays, 13:30-17:30 in EV 5.615 & EV 5.635
Pippin Barr
Assistant Professor
Department of Design and Computation Arts
pippin.barr@concordia.ca
(Please send emails with a subject line of “[CART 415] Your subject here")
www.pippinbarr.com
@pippinbarr
Office: EV 6.745
Office hours: Thursdays, 14:00-16:00 (unless otherwise specified)
Videogames are important. In order to better understand what videogames are and what they can do, we need to take them seriously both as experimental objects and as experimental instruments. In this course we address these key questions through an extended examination of the videogame as an experimental playground for design, with an especial focus on the close relationships between design, technology, and experience.
After completing this course, students should be able to:
- Work confidently with Unity to create and release experimental videogames
- Create and/or edit scripts written in C# in order to achieve more complex ideas
- Explain their design thinking and outcomes with reference to the technology itself, diverse videogame examples, other media, and theory and other forms of relevant literature
Each class will include time spent discussing the topic of the week with reference to diverse examples. Discussion sessions will alternately be led by the instructor and by the students week to week.
Students will produce five prototypes over the course of the semester, each one engaging with a different aspect of the Unity game engine.
Every week the class will playtest each other's in-progress or completed prototypes and then offer feedback through in-class discussion of the work produced.
At the end of the course, students will present their polished collection of prototypes to the class, using the opportunity to discuss their design inspirations and development process in depth.
All classes will include significant time for students to work on their assignments and exercises with the instructor to support both their technical and conceptual approach.
Students are generally expected to have some experience with the Unity game engine before the course begins. Students with no experience will need to spend extra time gaining the skills necessary, but this will be supported by the fact the course will be based around a Unity tutorial project. Most importantly, students are expected to have developed a design sensibility over their time in the program that will allow them to pursue unique and interesting designs during the course.
GitHub will replace the Moodle for this course. You are on GitHub now! The course GitHub repository will largely be used to host a wiki with course information and more. Students will be able to edit the wiki as well as register issues with GitHub's issue tracker as needed.
Additionally, students are encouraged to use GitHub (or equivalent code repository) to save, track, and host their coursework and design processes.
Specific evaluation requirements will be provided when assigned.
-
Lights, Camera Project (12.5%)
- Contribution to Lights, Camera References (2.5%)
- Rough prototype (3%)
- Finished prototype (7%)
-
Sound Project (12.5%)
- Contribution to Sound References (2.5%)
- Rough prototype (3%)
- Finished prototype (7%)
-
3D Objects Project (12.5%)
- Contribution to 3D Objects References (2.5%)
- Rough prototype (3%)
- Finished prototype (7%)
-
Final Project (32.5%)
- Final presentation (5%)
- Released final prototype set and menu system (22.5%)
- Press kit (5%)
- Process Journal (20%)
- Participation (10%)
- Participation includes attendance, asking questions, asking for help, contributing to discussions, participating in critiques, and coming to office hours (even if it's just to show off your work!)
Students have the right to write assignments in French at Concordia. Pippin can read French at an intermediate level, but naturally this may impact the quality of feedback possible (especially on writing skills). Presenting in French is to be avoided if possible unless you want to speak very slowly.
- Late work of any kind will lose one letter grade per day late, beginning immediately after the deadline (e.g. if it is two days late, work that would have received a B would receive a C+)
- Concordia University has an Academic Integrity Policy which must be followed.
- It is departmental policy that three (3) unexcused absences results in failing the course.
- It is class policy that being fifteen (15) or more minutes late without a reasonable excuse counts as an absence.
- The compulsory per semester departmental fee ($50) covering lab maintenance, workshops, and equipment borrowing privileges from the depot.
- Students who plan to use the lab computers will need a CDA account ($45).
- Generally speaking, all software used in class will be free
- Where relevant, students are welcome to work with software not available at the university but will obviously need to purchase it for themselves.
The practical work done in this class will take place in the computer lab EV 5.635 which contains 23 dual-boot Mac/Windows machines. In order to use the machines you will need a CDA account (as above). In addition, it is vital to know and remember that the computers do not keep work that you leave on their hard-drives. So please, dear god, use a USB key or save your work to your network drive or use GitHub or something similar.
You are of course welcome to use your own laptops and computers to the extent that you are able to install and manage the appropriate software on it, and the instructor will work to support that within reason.
(Click through for the standard information from D/CART that is to be included as part of all course outlines.)