Thing’s have been really busy and hectic that I haven’t had time to stop and think about what to write. Actually that’s not true — a lot of things has happened but I haven’t had time to chill and write about them. 
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet but this term I’m taking a Computer Science Project Course (CSC490) at school focusing on game design. The course is being taught by Steve Engels and the course homepage is here for those who are interested. Content is somewhat lacking but after all this is a new course and in the past few weeks he has made his slides along the way during course meeting times. He also asks us to do some research on various game topics like what makes a bad game, what makes games fun, psychology of games, and character design. Inspired by Jen’s blog, Girls in Gaming, the theme for the game design course this year is “women in gaming”. There are roughly 20 students in the course and we have been put into teams up to four. By the end of the course, each team is to produce a working prototype of an original game that would appeal to women and girls. I was pretty happy about the topic when I first found out about it.
My team has come up with a game with the working title Snap! where the gameplay is a mix of Metal Gear Solid and Beyond Good & Evil. Not to give away too much in its early stages, the player would play as a paparazzi who goes around shooting photographs of celebrities in the city and sells the photos for money. There are assignments the player would have to do in order to progress through the game. One of the things we’ll be doing for our game, which I’ll be responsible for, is using the Wii Remote as the controller input for the game. I’ll talk more about the game once we really get a working prototype.
So back to the course: just last week Steve announced to us that the game design course is now available as a regular course offering by the Computer Science Department! The new course designation is CSC404 – and it’s kind of fitting IMO. Actually, the department up until now has been quite reluctant to offer any game related course because they considered it as “non-educational” or something of that nature. But the demand IMO is quite high for game courses as it’s being asked every year by prospective U of T students only to be disappointed that there wasn’t any, which was too bad since it’s a good motivator for getting into Computer Science (like myself — I went specifically into it because I wanted to get into game development). But anyway, it’s now being offered, so yay for the future students who’ll be taking it.
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