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My students completed their mid-term map projects a few weeks ago and I’ve been wanting to update on the progress of the course. Everyone was required to recreate the map that is outlined for design in Half-Life 2 Mods for Dummies. I felt this was an important exercise for the class because it gave everyone familiarity with the tools and they all had a common goal that they could assist each other with if they needed to. It worked out well. The grades for this assignment were very high and I couldn’t have been more happy.

I selected the work of one of my students to share with the Internet as a representation of the map we completed in class. Andrew Ross is one of the student developers in my class who I felt demonstrated a near perfect submission. If you are interested in playing the map we completed you can download it here: Andrew Ross’ Mid-Term Map Submission

If you have any comments of feedback on the map feel free to leave it here. Also if you’d like to learn how to develop the map yourself, purchase a copy of the book here.

At the conclusion of the project we were lucky enough to have the map’s designer and our textbook author, Erik Guilfoyle  come and guest lecture. He talked to our class about the game development industry and what it is like to work within it. The students really enjoyed his talk and found it to be extremely informative.

Our class is now elbow deep in the development of their final projects. I will post about that and more at the completetion of the semester. Until then…

It is Sept 19th. Intro. to Game Design has entered its 3rd week. You’re probably wondering how everything has been going. Let’s recap:

• I secured academic licensing for Source for my entire class just in the nick of time
• I was able to get in touch with Half-Life 2 Mods for Dummies author and we’ve been communicating
• My developer contact at Valve offered additional advice on various issues of the course
• I completely fleshed out the entire rest of the semester

We started class on Sept. 7th. I was surprised to see that all of my students had laptops so that was a big relief for me as I was worried about the prospect of running my class’ hands-on lessons in Rider’s CIS Lab.

I have a mix of students in the class; hardcore gamers, casual gamers, & people who aren’t gamers. So far their attitudes about the course have been enthusiastic.

The capstone assignment for my course is for a student to design from scratch their own map in any of the Valve Source games we’ll be touching upon in class (Portal, HL2:DM, TF2, L4D, etc.). One student already approached me with his idea for the class and I must say I am very impressed with the vision this student has demonstrated in this short amount of time. I look forward to seeing his finished project.

We spent the first three week’s in Phil Co’s book to give the students a baseline about game development terminology and a high level overview of what game design entails. Today we started with the hands on exercises in Dummies to get them familiar with using Source SDK. We’ll see how it goes but I have high hopes thus far.

On the subject of teaching game design, Valve Corporation has rolled out its new initiative, Learning with Portals. Its nice to see that I am a little ahead of the curve on using Source SDK in class. I hope that it gets more widely adopted at both the collegiate and elementary/high school level.

I will report back in a few weeks to discuss our progress with the more advanced Source SDK techniques that the students will be learning soon.

Till then…

As you can see above I have selected a book for my Game Design course that I am teaching at Rider this Fall. The book as you can see is titled “Half-Life 2 Mods for Dummies” and interestingly enough it is the only book of its type. I chose this book because I liked how it breaks down the level creation process while at the same time using various parts of development to teach you the use of each of the tools within Hammer (Source’s map editing software). I am about 10 chapters into this book and I was surprised how simple it is to create a map and then play your map. I think this simplicity will translate to success in the classroom for this Intro course. This simplicity has also validated my choice, in my mind, to teach Source SDK as opposed to Gamemaker 7, which was previously taught by others.
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So after not having anything to write about for a really long time, I think I’ve finally stumbled across something worth documenting. This Fall I will be teaching “Intro to Game Design” for Rider University’s Computer Information System Department. The course was previously taught using a product called “GameMaker 7″. In my preparation for this class I have decided to move the class to Source SDK. I made this decision because many of the PC market’s top games have been developed recently in Source and I feel it will give my students some real hands on experience with tools actively being used for game development in the industry.

I have decided to chronicle my adventure with teaching Source SDK so that others can learn what a great platform it is for teaching Game Design. Hopefully some discussion will go on and questions will be asked. We will see how that goes. I plan on writing another post in the next day or so chronicling the work I have done already up until this point. From that point forward I will blog as I go.

So until then…