Creating a digital game involves merging many the skills of many disciplines in to a single cohesive whole. It involves applying principles from computer programming, two and three dimensional digital art, animation, physics, mathematics, artificial intelligence, user interface and experience design, psychology, narrative design and visual communication, to provide an incomplete list. This course focuses upon understanding and demonstrating the technical implementation of game play mechanics within a game engine framework. The purpose of this course is designed to expand upon the work done in Game Design Methodology (04:547:315) to provide an introduction in working with these disparate skill sets by building subsets of a complete game in a digital form.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss and document game creation decisions using industry standard terminology: In this objective, students will be required to show that they can conceive of a game play system and can describe the goal state of their implementation. Focus must be given on using appropriate terminology as well as selecting specific behaviors to implement.

• Implement examples of game play systems in the game engine used in the course: In this objective students will be required to demonstrate a functional knowledge of the object model and scripting languages of the disparate systems available within the game engine.

• Assemble multiple game play systems in to a cohesive game play experience: In this objective students show how they are able to demonstrate the totality of objectives 1 and 2 by conceiving of, implementing and documenting an aggregation of different systems in a single user experience.