Teaching an Intro to Game Design class
2008-09-14 00:52 -
I haven’t posted anything technical in a while, due to the fact that a good deal of my work at Google as an SRE is day-to-day maintenance and refactoring rather than projects that I can discuss publicly. However, here’s something that I can mention externally.
Standard disclaimer: any opinions expressed in the material posted below are mine alone and not necessarily those of my employer, etc. etc.
A month ago, I was asked to write and give a 1-hour presentation on game design to a class of students attending Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute – the goal of the class was to give the students an opportunity to learn about applications of computer science they might go into once they’ve graduated from school.
The slide show I produced, building on some preliminary draft material written by the CSSI organizers, will be made available as soon as I secure permission (working on it…); the source code for the corresponding 2d grid game engine I wrote for teaching purposes is at http://www.ctyalcove.org/~elizabeth/gameengine.zip (Google copyright on the code, but Apache licensed so you can do whatever you like with it within those terms)
The simple game engine is fairly rudimentary interface-wise, but is a reasonable teaching tool for demonstrating how one might build upon an engine to create a game of one’s own and provides a good deal of flexibility. A group of 3 students implemented connect-4 within about 60-90 minutes using it following my presentation, and the engine supplies working examples of tic-tac-toe and lights-out.
<- sudo 1.6.9 interactions with PAM and libpam_afs_session Announcing the newest member of my family ->
