Course Description

Innovating Game Development is a games research course being offered in the Spring 2006 semester. We will be discussing current trends in game development, focusing mainly on new and innovative technologies that will likely shape the game industry in the coming years. Students will work alone or in groups to design and develop a fully functional video game based around some novel technological paradigm of their choice. First, students will have to create a project proposal and "sell" their idea to the course staff. Once their idea is approved, student teams will combine their inspiration and creativity, technical knowledge, and software engineering to prepare their project for "release" (demonstrations during Arcade Day). The course will satisfy the design requirement for the CS Sc.B. concentration.

Game engines (and related engines for rendering, physics, AI, etc.) are huge engineering efforts that have yielded hundreds of thousands lines of code and consumed years of effort by experienced developers. It would be unwise to attempt such software engineering effort to reinvent such engines in the space of one semester. Instead, we focus on games research. Specifically, improving the technology underlying interactive entertainment systems. We will emphasize focused innovation of a single aspect or component of game technology. Projects will be expected to heavily utilize and improve existing third-party libraries and solutions. By leveraging external resources, effort and interest is directed to enhancing existing and/or creating new components applicable to game development as a whole.

What is Games Research?

It is scientific research applied to games, silly. We categorize efforts towards making games into roughly three categories: Game design: the process of designing the content, background and rules of a game or class of games. Game development: the process by which a specific game is produced. Games research : the process of developing methdologies and techniques applicable to classes of current and future games. Our definition of games research is based on the following definition of research (This definition is based on terminology from human subjects research):

Research is a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.

The key aspect is the creation of generalizable knowledge applicable beyond a specific project. This aspect separates research from development in that your ideas should be applicable to entire classes of games and serve as a foundation for new types of games and innovations. A good games research project will yield responses like ``You can do that in a game?!''.