game industry technical directors of
the conceptual age.
Our approach to creating a cross-disciplinary program was to design
courses that could be taken by noncomputer scientists, as well as by
computer science majors. First-se-mester undergraduates survey game
play, from the start of games to using
(among other things) old consoles,
old PC games, and emulators. Students come out of the course hooked
on our degree program and wanting
more. They then take a video-game
production course to build individual
games using GameMaker and hear
from industry speakers on game development. Next is CS-281 Pipelines
for Games & Interactives in which they
learn how to create assets for games,
including 3D models and animations. One achievement is a pipeline
asset and source-code management
system we designed that is shared by
all game-development courses in the
program. We teach our students how
to use it early on, simplifying and enhancing their ability to develop games
in subsequent courses. We also place
all our students in a semester-long
character-animation course.
In their final one-and-a-half years
before graduation, our students become ready for game development.
All take a course developing a serious
game in a large team for an interested
sponsor. Their last year before graduation is in CS-491A/B Final Game Projects building games in large cross-disciplinary teams from August to May,
with game designs selected through
a design playoff the previous May.
The Final Game Projects course is
administered jointly by the School of
Cinematic Arts and has students from
computer science (bachelor’s and
master’s students), interactive media
(bachelor’s of fine arts and master’s of
fine arts), fine arts (bachelor’s of fine
arts), animation (bachelor’s of fine
arts), music composition, and film
scoring. Teams in this class include
from 11 to 25 students building significant games over its two-semester
run, aiming for contest submission by
the end of the second semester.
Strong cross-disciplinary collaboration occurs, with results presented
at the end of each semester on Demo
Day when game-industry executives
are invited to review the students’
work; the accompanying screenshots
are indicative of the visual quality.
Artemis Chronicle, a beautiful action-adventure title (see page 67), demonstrates the powerful features of the
NitroX Engine, a revolutionary, complete development framework for
creating XNA games. Both the game
and the NitroX engine were built in
the CS-491AB Final Games course
over two semesters. Air Guitar God, a
beat-matching iPhone game (below),
incorporates a student-designed algorithm for automatically computing
beat detection from any song imported into the game. And Slice, an action
role-playing game (below), puts bat-
tles at your fingertips on the iPhone.
Videos of the most recent Demo
Day are at http://gamepipe.usc.edu/
USC_GamePipe_Laboratory/R%26D/
R%26D.html.
At the end of each academic year,
we now routinely place large numbers
of students (typically around 35) in
internships/jobs in the game industry where they are nearly instantly
productive. In the Fall semesters in
2007 and 2008, a team on Demo Day
was offered a commercial deal to turn
their game into a company for further
development or prepare to ship commercially. Spring 2009 included five
student-built games under commercial consideration.
opening screen from Air Guitar God, an iPhone beat-matching game
developed by students in the uSC GamePipe Laboratory’s mobile games course.
Scene from Slice, an iPhone gesture-based fighting game developed
by students in the uSC GamePipe Laboratory.
