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For Curtis Martin, a computer science course entitled Computer Game Design and Implementation and offered for the first time this past spring was a dream come true.
"Game design was the class I had been wanting to take since the first day I entered college," said Martin, who completed the course in his final semester at the University. "The class did not disappoint--and I had some pretty high expectations."
Carolina is not the first university to create programs in game design and programming. But Carolina is hoping to carve for itself at least a niche in the field that supplies graduates to the $50-billion-per-year computer gaming industry.
To do that, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering plans to develop a computer game "cluster," consisting of 21 credit hours of courses that students will take as electives. The courses will be developed in conjunction with media arts and mathematics faculty and focus on the basics: 3-D graphics and multimedia, animation and digital arts, numerical analysis and optimization, databases, and artificial intelligence.
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| Jijun Tang |
"The art department is definitely going all in with this," said Simon Tarr, an assistant professor in media arts who plans to teach a video game design course next spring in conjunction the game design course taught by Jijun Tang, an assistant professor in computer science and computer engineering. "The course I'll be teaching will focus on the storytelling, project management, and artistic design aspects of gaming, with less emphasis on programming than would be found in a computer science and engineering course.
"By then, the art department will have completed a redesign of our media arts facilities that will include a bluescreen stage and visual effects lab. Should be exciting!"
The department also is offering summer camps to high school students interested in computer game development. The hope, of course, is that some of those students will enroll in the College of Engineering and Computing down the road.
Like other computer science departments at universities across the country, Carolina's has seen a precipitous enrollment decline since 2000 when the dot com bubble burst and technology degrees lost some of their luster. Department faculty hope the computer gaming courses could attract new interest in the computing field, which still forecasts roughly three jobs for every graduate.
"A lot of our students don't want to graduate with too narrow of a degree; they want to keep their options open," Tang said. "They're interviewing with insurance companies, utility companies, and other businesses that have a lot of programming needs. When we have this thread fully developed, our graduates will be able to get jobs with at least medium-sized computer game companies."
The initial computer game design course used a project--the development of a novel computer game among each group of students--as its central focus. Each of the student teams named itself--Space Banditos, The Slackers, and Psychosoft were a few--and the games they developed: Centurion, a spaceship motif; Noroi Kujito, an arcade shooting game; and Chrome Desires, a race car simulator.
"With development of a game as the goal, students are drawn into the course and spend a lot of time learning outside the classroom," Tang said. "The textbook only covers so much; you really learn by doing."
"The Game Design course was incredibly grueling at times, sometimes requiring me to stay up all night to fix a single bug," said Martin, who graduated in May. "But the end result is even better than I hoped it would be. Dr. Tang did a great job with the course, and I highly recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in making games. The work load is tremendous, but it is by far the most rewarding experience I had in a class at USC."
7/07
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Screen images created in the Computer Game Design and Implementation course
