Digital Game Design: Getting Started with Perlenspiel

Overview

Game Design and Practical Creativity. Ability to define, express and iteratively refine digital game ideas in working code.

Game Engine Scripting. Ability to implement game mechanics and aesthetics using common programming patterns and syntax, including variables, conditional statements, functions, objects and arrays in an interactive, event-driven engine architecture.

Introduction to Core Web Technologies. Ability to set up and compose projects in JavaScript, the industry-standard programming language that powers all Internet browsers and >95% of the pages on the World Wide Web.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Introduction: Elements of Microgame Design
- Software engineering and asset production are the means of digital game development, but the end is an intentional experience. Digital game design is the process of creating, implementing and iteratively refining that experience.This hands-on course will demonstrate the practice of digital game design and development using Perlenspiel, a cloud-based, abstract microgame engine programmed in JavaScript. Lectures and code demos will familiarize you with Perlenspiel’s event-driven architecture and…

Course 2: Synthesis: Realizing Game Ideas in Code
- This course completes our survey of Perlenspiel’s API with a look at two of the engine’s most powerful and versatile subsystems: grid planes and sprites. Other topics include procedural color generation and the use of custom image files for designing and implementing multi-function game maps, concluding with a discussion of two issues of critical importance to game designers: titles and endings.