Game Development
American University | Spring 2025
Professor Mike Treanor, PhD, MFA
Description
In this course, students will produce many prototypes for 4 or 5 game genres. Different than a course that treats game development as a technical topic, this course will emphasize creating short and engaging gameplay prototypes with the goal of creating novel ideas that would support further development into more complete games. The focus of each class session will be to provide individual feedback on prototype quality, and the brainstorm new ideas.
Assignments
| Assignment | Due |
|---|---|
| 0. Environment setup | 1-22-25 |
| 1.1. Breakout 1 | 1-22-25 |
| 1.2. Breakout 2a and 2b | 1-29-25 |
| 1.3. Breakout 3 | 2-5-25 |
| 1.4. Final Breakout Prototype | 2-12-25 |
| 1.5. Reflection | 2-12-25 |
| 2.1. Platformer Analysis | 2-19-25 |
| 2.2. Platformer Controls - Round 1 | 2-26-24 |
| 2.3. Platformer Progression | 3-5-25 |
| 2.4. Final Platformer and Reflection | 3-19-25 |
| 3.1. Grid-based Simulation Part 1 | 3-26-25 |
| 3.2. Grid-based Simulation Part 2 | 4-2-25 |
| 4.1. Conditional NPC Dialogue | 4-9-25 |
| 4.2. Interactive NPC Dialogue | 4-16-25 |
| 5. Final Project | 5-7-25 |
Examples
| Date | Topic | Code | Playable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-15-25 | Breakout - Unity Basics | code | play |
| 1-29-25 | Breakout - Custom Ball Physics | code | play |
| 2-5-25 | Breakout - Scaling time per object, trail renderer (with bloom), screen shake (with observer pattern / coroutines) | code | play |
| 2-19-25 | A Basic 2D Platformer with Custom Physics | code | play |
| 2-26-25 | A More complicated (sort of broken feeling) 3d platformer with all sorts of custom physics, wall jump/slide, and moving platforms | code | play |
| 3-5-25 | The basics of creating an interactive grid | code | play |
| 3-19-25 | Updating Cells based on neighbors, clicking on cells | GridManager CellScript | play |
| 3-26-25 | A* Algorithm | GridManager CellScript | play |
| 4-2-25 | A Dialogue System, Basic Dialogue UI, 3D Models and Animation | code | play |
| 4-7-25 | Unity and Ink integration, using Ink to create interactive characters | code | play |