Section Information
Greeting
I'm excited to be working with you on this fascinating topic. Game
development is a hot topic right now, but far few people understand
what makes game development a unique form of programming. In this
class we'll take a high-level look at the strategies, algorithms, and
techniques of game development. The actual development environment is
not critical, but all examples will be developed in Macromedia Flash.
This setting is chosen because:
- Flash handles low-end processes automatically, allowing us to
quickly talk about higher-level game design concepts.
- Flash produces multi-platform executables easily delivered over
the web (facilitating grading, among other things)
- The types of applications created have immediate commercial
viability, as Flash-based applets are commonly used in advertising,
education, and entertainment venues
- Flash uses ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript. The language
is quite friendly, but still supports some modern constructs.
- Flash has built-in support for most of the primary tenets of
modern 2D game design, including a form of object-oriented
programming, XML support, and client-server communication
capabilities.
- The concepts learned in this class will easily transfer to any
other game engine, 2D or 3D.