Game Programming Course

I made a game programming course under the title "Practical Game Programming" in my school in the fall of 2010. It was surprisingly rough, and I completely hated my voice for the next day after the first session. After that it became somewhat easier..

The structure of the course was such that I talked all sorts of theoretical stuff for a couple of hours, and then we went to a computer lab and played around with source code (based on my graphics/game programming tutorial).

I've posted the course slides here. Bear in mind that this is kind of the 1.0, "alpha" version of the course. Additional thing to keep in mind is that the target audience was bunch of kids who had never programmed outside of school, even though some kind of programming was a prerequisite.

Course Slides (2010)

00intro.pdf

185kB

Introduction. Who's who, what the course is about, some philosophy.

01project.pdf

234kB

What the mandatory project is really about.

02structure.pdf

384kB

High-level structure of a computer game.

03physics.pdf

166kB

What I mean by "physics" in computer games.

04optimization.pdf

173kB

Basics of optimization

05ai.pdf

410kB

What AI in games is, and what it isn't, and some techniques.

06graphics.pdf

216kB

Intro to graphics

07audio.pdf

61kB

Audio overview

08network.pdf

63kB

Networking overview

09business.pdf

61kB

Some aspects of the games business

10blending.pdf

53kB

A few common blending algorithms

11collisions.pdf

57kB

Some simple 2d collision detection algorithms

12rasterization.pdf

85kB

Turning ideal primitives into pixels

13collisionresponse.pdf

87kB

Some simple collision response algorithms

14interpolation.pdf

152kB

Getting from 0 to 1 in various ways

15assets.pdf

53kB

Some talk about asset management in the game

16accessibility.pdf

62kB

A few words about accessibility in games

17camera.pdf

51kB

Concept of a world larger than the screen

18particles.pdf

51kB

Particle system basics

19goodenough.pdf

112kB

What is good enough?

20towerdefence.pdf

58kB

Picking apart the tower defence genre

21matchthree.pdf

54kB

Picking apart the match three genre

22hiddenobject.pdf

50kB

Picking apart the hidden object genre

23breakout.pdf

62kB

Picking apart the breakout genre

24visualnovel.pdf

91kB

Picking apart the visual novel genre

25platformer.pdf

61kB

Picking apart the platformer genre

98returning_project.pdf

50kB

Some notes about how to return the project

99books.pdf

59kB

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