ACADEMIA
LSU Professor Takes Video Game Design Class to the Next Level with More Collaboration, New Platforms
Imagine a college course where your assignments are to play, develop and test original video games.
This is an opportunity LSU has offered since the Fall 2007 semester, in collaboration with University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC. In the class, which students attend via high-definition video streaming broadcast from Chicago to Baton Rouge, participants learn core concepts to develop and design video games, from storyline to character development to coding.
Working together in groups of three to four, the students form competing video game companies. As a final project, each group develops an original game, and for the final class, the students have a video game marathon in which a panel of faculty, former game class winners and video game industry professionals from both Baton Rouge and Chicago judge their work on several characteristics.
In previous semesters, there were many more UIC than LSU students, and Jason Leigh, a computer science professor at UIC and director of the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, taught the course with support from LSU faculty.
This year, the course achieved a more even balance between the two universities. Robert Kooima, Ph.D., who previously worked with Leigh at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, came to LSU in the Fall 2008 semester to do research as part of the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative in digital media.
Kooima agreed to be the LSU instructor for the course, and worked directly with Leigh to make the teaching more interactive between the two locations than it had been previously.
This year, the course had such even enrollment that out of the eight groups that formed in the class, seven were equally split with team members from LSU and UIC. The video game design teams are interdisciplinary to emphasize links between art and technology. Art students work on animation and character design while computer science students work on the video game programming and code-writing components.
“The structure we were able to do this semester, with the teams equally comprised of LSU and UIC students, really emphasized the collaborative skills that are an integral part of this field,” Kooima said. “To complete their final video game projects, the students had to rely on video conferencing technology more heavily than previous classes, and they had to really assess each other’s strengths and weaknesses to work effectively as a team between two campuses.”
Another new feature of the Spring 2009 semester video game design course was an emphasis on creating games with multi-player, multi-touch capabilities.
“Given the emergence of the iPhone as a gaming platform, multi-touch game design is a driving issue in the game industry, and it is something students must be able to produce if they aspire to work in video game development,” Kooima said.
To give the class a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming, Kooima built a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table that students can use to play and display their video games.
Kooima will display the table and some of the top video games students produced this semester during SIGGRAPH: International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies, the premier conference to showcase new developments in digital media. SIGGRAPH will take place in New Orleans Aug. 3-7.
As in previous semesters, students spent the final class period of the semester playing and presenting the video games they created. Kooima, Leigh and the judging panel evaluated the games on criteria such as interface design, graphics design and programming, and the games constituted a large component of each student’s final grade.
The Spring 2009 video game class winners are:
• Tuff Panda - Best Visual
William Folse - LSU
Andrew Staley - IIA
Sujatha Nagarajan - UIC
• Tough Panda - Best Audio
Brian Bell - LSU
Sujatha Nagarajan - UIC
• Olympus Studios - Best Technical
Brad Johnson - LSU
Sean DeRouen - LSU
Eddie Riveron - UIC
• Egoshots - Best Interaction
Yasser Mostafa - UIC
Nirari Barm - UIC
• Hamster Wheel - Best Book End
David Jackson - LSU
Kevin Spillman - UIC
Jason Demeter - UIC
• Egoshots - Best Gameplay
Yasser Mostafa - UIC
Nirari Barn - UIC
Richard Perkins - LSU
David Jackson - LSU
For more information on the teams from the Spring 2009 video game course, or to see pictures from the team’s Web sites, please visit http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/schedSpr2009.html .
In future offerings of the course, which is scheduled at LSU both as a computer science course (CSC 4700) and an arts course (FMA 4001), students will continue developing multi-touch games that use new platforms such as the LCD table.
For more information on LSU initiatives in digital media, please visit www.cct.lsu.edu orwww.avatar.lsu.edu .
This is an opportunity LSU has offered since the Fall 2007 semester, in collaboration with University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC. In the class, which students attend via high-definition video streaming broadcast from Chicago to Baton Rouge, participants learn core concepts to develop and design video games, from storyline to character development to coding.
Working together in groups of three to four, the students form competing video game companies. As a final project, each group develops an original game, and for the final class, the students have a video game marathon in which a panel of faculty, former game class winners and video game industry professionals from both Baton Rouge and Chicago judge their work on several characteristics.
In previous semesters, there were many more UIC than LSU students, and Jason Leigh, a computer science professor at UIC and director of the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, taught the course with support from LSU faculty.
This year, the course achieved a more even balance between the two universities. Robert Kooima, Ph.D., who previously worked with Leigh at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, came to LSU in the Fall 2008 semester to do research as part of the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative in digital media.
Kooima agreed to be the LSU instructor for the course, and worked directly with Leigh to make the teaching more interactive between the two locations than it had been previously.
This year, the course had such even enrollment that out of the eight groups that formed in the class, seven were equally split with team members from LSU and UIC. The video game design teams are interdisciplinary to emphasize links between art and technology. Art students work on animation and character design while computer science students work on the video game programming and code-writing components.
“The structure we were able to do this semester, with the teams equally comprised of LSU and UIC students, really emphasized the collaborative skills that are an integral part of this field,” Kooima said. “To complete their final video game projects, the students had to rely on video conferencing technology more heavily than previous classes, and they had to really assess each other’s strengths and weaknesses to work effectively as a team between two campuses.”
Another new feature of the Spring 2009 semester video game design course was an emphasis on creating games with multi-player, multi-touch capabilities.
“Given the emergence of the iPhone as a gaming platform, multi-touch game design is a driving issue in the game industry, and it is something students must be able to produce if they aspire to work in video game development,” Kooima said.
To give the class a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming, Kooima built a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table that students can use to play and display their video games.
Kooima will display the table and some of the top video games students produced this semester during SIGGRAPH: International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies, the premier conference to showcase new developments in digital media. SIGGRAPH will take place in New Orleans Aug. 3-7.
As in previous semesters, students spent the final class period of the semester playing and presenting the video games they created. Kooima, Leigh and the judging panel evaluated the games on criteria such as interface design, graphics design and programming, and the games constituted a large component of each student’s final grade.
The Spring 2009 video game class winners are:
• Tuff Panda - Best Visual
William Folse - LSU
Andrew Staley - IIA
Sujatha Nagarajan - UIC
• Tough Panda - Best Audio
Brian Bell - LSU
Sujatha Nagarajan - UIC
• Olympus Studios - Best Technical
Brad Johnson - LSU
Sean DeRouen - LSU
Eddie Riveron - UIC
• Egoshots - Best Interaction
Yasser Mostafa - UIC
Nirari Barm - UIC
• Hamster Wheel - Best Book End
David Jackson - LSU
Kevin Spillman - UIC
Jason Demeter - UIC
• Egoshots - Best Gameplay
Yasser Mostafa - UIC
Nirari Barn - UIC
Richard Perkins - LSU
David Jackson - LSU
For more information on the teams from the Spring 2009 video game course, or to see pictures from the team’s Web sites, please visit http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/schedSpr2009.html .
In future offerings of the course, which is scheduled at LSU both as a computer science course (CSC 4700) and an arts course (FMA 4001), students will continue developing multi-touch games that use new platforms such as the LCD table.
For more information on LSU initiatives in digital media, please visit www.cct.lsu.edu orwww.avatar.lsu.edu .