EECS 494 - Computer Game Design

Last fall, I undertook UMich’s game design course as part of my undergraduate capstone requirements. The course, taught by Jeremy Gibson - a new addition to the UMich faculty after teaching for several years at USC - taught us proper design principles and techniques with regards to game development and interactive user experiences. In addition, Gibson’s course introduced us to the basics of Agile development, which for our purposes involved scrum sessions each lecture, stories/tasks, and burndown charts.

The workload was divided into four projects across the semester - one physical paper/cardboard game, one 2D game, one 3D game, and a final capstone project in a format/medium of our choosing. I have posted all four of my projects (or what I can of them) to a GitHub repo, where they can be downloaded or viewed. I’ve provided brief summaries of each project below:

• P1: Supernatural Soccer
  First project for the course; a physical board game designed to be played by 4 players divided into teams of 2. Features fast and strategic goal-oriented gameplay.

• P2: Fytecode
  Second project for the course; a 2D computer game for a single player to be played with a mouse and keyboard. A short concept demo that features increasingly difficult gameplay reminiscent of older arcade titles.

• P3: Leave No Trace
  Third project for the course; a 3D computer game for a single player to be played with a mouse and keyboard. A minimal concept demo that mixes 3D platforming with time-limited elements of “endless runners” like Canabalt or Temple Run.

• P4: Collapse
  Fourth and final project for the course; a 3D computer game to be played over networks with 2 teams of 2-4 players each using game controllers such as the XBox360 controller. A prototype game that mixes 2D brawler elements from games like Super Smash Brothers with objective-oriented gameplay from popular multiplayer games like League of Legends or Team Fortress 2.