Approaches to Videogame Design

This is a project-based course exploring multiple approaches to the creation of videogames. Students will develop four games, approaching them variously as "sketch," "engineering," "experiment" and "research." We will look at existing videogames and media documenting their development to ground our discussion about the cultural practices of videogame design.

Each week will have one hour of lecture time and two hours of lab/tutorial time. We will learn to use the game engines Twine and Stencyl. Both engines use a visual programming interface and do not require previous programming experience.

Week 1 - Sketch
Lecture: Sketching and doodling are game design strategies.
Lab: Making a game with Twine.
Assignment: Go to a specific place, for a specific period of time, with the intention of making a game there. Make a game with Twine. Don't plan ahead, just follow your train of thought.

• Merritt Kopas - Brace
• J. Chastain - Rat Chaos
• Robert Yang - Apollo 2

• Ian Bogost - "Media Microecology" from "How to Do Things With Videogames"
• Anna Anthropy - "The New Videogame" from "Rise of the Videogame Zinesters"

• Merritt Kopas - Queer Pirate Plane
• Jordan Magnuson - Gametrekking Omnibus
• Rowan Lipkovits - Guide of Identification of Musical the Instruments of Frobnia
• Various - Twinehub

• Twine
• Anna Anthropy's guide to Twine
• Official Twine documentation

Week 2 - Engineering
Lab: Card-and-paper prototyping.
Lab: Getting oriented in Stencyl. Collecting input from the player and affecting objects in the world.
Unit Assignment: Make a game in Stencyl. Approach it as an engineering project: plan ahead, make drawings, write things down. We'll review both the game and your plan together in week 4.
Weekly Assignment: Make a playing cards prototype of the game that you will later implement in Stencyl. We'll play them in class next week. Do the "Stencyl Crash Course" to review the interface & concepts.

• Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman - "Rules on Three Level" from "Rules of Play"
• A visit to ID Software
• DOOM postmortem - Start at "DOOM Bible," go thru "DOOM Pre-alpha," or just watch the whole thing

Week 3 - Engineering
Lecture: Simulation is a rhetorical design strategy that makes claims about the thing being simulated. We'll look at games that present themselves as simulations, and how the designers' contexts and values become embedded in the systems they create (deliberately or otherwise).
Lab: Physics, randomness and emergence in Stencyl.

Week 4 - Engineering
Play and critique "engineering" games and accompanying plans.

Week 5 - Experiment
Lecture: Design is a process of discovery. We'll look at how a formal experimental process can guide a design, for better or worse.
Lab: Parameterizing and tuning with attributes.
Assignment: Make a game in Stencyl. Approach it as an experiment. Make three successive versions of the game, archiving a copy of it at each stage. Have a friend or stranger test it and document the results. Evaluate and iterate.

Week 6 - Experiment
Lecture: Failure is an option. We'll look at design practices that seek out glitches, bugs, and other failures.
Lab: Advanced Stencyl behaviors & attributes. Graphical effects in Stencyl: blend modes, camera tricks.

Week 7 - Experiment
Play and critique "experiment" games.

Week 8 - Research
Lecture: Interaction design is a form of empathy. We'll look at how the "imagined player" is used as a tool in game design.
Assignment: Make a game in Stencyl or Twine. Approach it as a research project. Research a subject and collect your research in the form of a videogame.
Lab: Reading data from the web into Stencyl.

Week 9 - Research
Lecture: Game mechanics have history (and other contexts). We'll trace the evolution of a few game mechanics through their histories as people beg, borrow and steal each ideas, and see how they are transformed by the social contexts they pass through.
Lab: Addressing any remaining specific topical/technical issues that have come up during the course.

Week 10 - Research
Play and critique "research" games.