CS 6457: Video Game Design
Review and Retrospective
Instructor: Jeff Wilson
Semester: Spring 2024
Overall Rating: 8.4/10
✅ Pros
- The instructor is passionate, approachable, and genuinely invested in student success.
- Engaging and interesting subject matter.
- Seeing a complete game come to life is very rewarding.
❌ Cons
- The group project is a big part of course and can be hard to get people on the same page
🕒 Time Commitment
Group project is about 10 hours per week for a group where all memebers are contributing equally. Individual assingments are about 6 hours each. Modules and quizes represent another ~3 hours per week.
✍️ Assignments
The course is split in half with 4 individual deliverables and 4 major team deliverables.
Individual Assignments
Milestone 1 - Player Movement & Animation
- Theme: Third-person character control
- Desciption: Create a controllable player character using Unity’s Mecanim system with idle, walk, and run animations. Integrate Mixamo-rigged characters and support both keyboard and gamepad input.
- Reflection: An introduction to Unity’s animation system. Most of my time went into familiarizing myself with the Unity UI.
Milestone 2 - Camera Systems & Elevators
- Theme: Environmental interaction & cinematic perspective
- Desciption: Implement a third-person follow camera and animated elevators using Mecanim state transitions. Handle interactions like parenting when standing on a moving platform.
- Reflection: There is lot’s of information online about doing this. This one was straightforward.
Milestone 3 - Menus, Collectibles & Animated Triggers
- Theme: UI design and object interaction
- Desciption: Add a main menu and in-game pause menu using Unity’s UI system. Implement collectibles restricted to specific characters and create animation-triggered interactions. Optional throwing mechanic included.
- Reflection: Again there is lot’s of information online about how to do this. This one was straightforward.
Milestone 4 - AI Navigation & State Machines
- Theme: Autonomous agents and patrol logic
- Desciption: Use Unity’s NavMeshAgent to create an AI character that patrols waypoints and intercepts moving targets. Implement a custom procedural FSM and visualize predictive movement.
- Reflection: A neat way to demonstrate a Unity AI navigation system. Having gone though the Video Game AI course previously I was suprised at how easy this was to implement. Unity basically does all the work for you.
Team Assignments
Pitch
- Theme: Concept development
- Description: Collaborate with teammates to brainstorm and pitch a unique game idea, defining its core mechanics, target audience, and design goals.
- Reflection: This was an opportunity to ask quetions of the TA and confirm our understanding of the project requirements. The deliverable was a document that fulfilled the pitch requirements.
Alpha
- Theme: Initial prototype
- Description: Build a rough but functional version of the game demonstrating basic mechanics and interactions. Submit a playable Unity build along with a progress report.
- Reflection: The classic pitfall in game projects is trying to do too much, so we focused on scoping down our game as much as possible while still meeting the requirements. In hindsight, this was a smart decision.
Playtesting
- Theme: User feedback & iteration
- Description: Conduct structured playtests and gather feedback on usability, difficulty, and overall engagement. Analyze results and propose actionable design changes.
- Reflection: Each team member was asked to recruit a few friends to playtest the game, collect their feedback, and contribute to an aggregated report. Together, we used this input to identify key issues and develop a plan for addressing the most impactful areas of improvement.
Final Game
- Theme: Polished delivery
- Description: Finalize core features, refine visuals and audio, and submit a polished Unity build with a design document and gameplay video.
- Reflection: A rewarding culmination to the course—the game came together, though there was definitely a last-minute scramble to ensure everyone’s pieces integrated smoothly. In the end, our project received the most upvotes out of 50+ submissions, which was a good feeling.
📖 Quizes
There are short quizs with 1 to 2 questions each throughout the course that acompany each module.
📚 Course Content
Module 1 · Game Engines
Explores the evolution and inner workings of game engines, real-time simulation, and how perception and synchronization affect gameplay feel.
Module 2 · Animation
Traces animation from early techniques to 2D/3D and interactive systems in Unity—highlighting how motion supports gameplay and storytelling.
Module 3 · Physics Simulation
Introduces collision detection, constraints, and real-time interaction; includes Unity-based implementation for realistic and responsive game worlds.
Module 4 · Case Study: Trespasser
Analyzes the 1998 game Trespasser as an ambitious but flawed early attempt at immersive physics and procedural storytelling.
Module 5 · Game Feel & Formal Elements
Covers how inputs, timing, responsiveness, and audio contribute to “game feel.” Introduces formal elements like mechanics, goals, rules, and boundaries.
Module 6 · Artificial Intelligence
Details core AI systems for games: steering behaviors, A* pathfinding, decision trees, NavMeshes, and Unity demos to see them in action.
Module 7 · Object Dependencies & Communication
Explains how game objects share data and coordinate behaviors within Unity’s architecture.
Module 8 · Prototyping
Focuses on rapid iteration and early testing. Includes real-world examples and case studies (Tilt to Live, others).
Module 9 · Case Study: Valve’s Cabal Process
Breaks down Valve’s cross-disciplinary design method as used in Half-Life, emphasizing collaborative iteration.
Module 10 · Playtesting
Teaches best practices for testing games with players—what to look for, how to collect feedback, and how to iterate on it.
Module 11 · Audio
Covers digital audio, psychoacoustics, 3D sound, music theory, and editing tools like Audacity to shape mood and gameplay experience.
Module 12 · Interesting Choices
Explores what makes decisions compelling, meaningful, or strategically interesting—covering dilemmas, punishments, and “fun killers.”
Module 13 · Interactive Narrative
Introduces branching stories, machinima, and modern narrative systems in games—from dialogue trees to dynamic plot progression.
Module 14 · Future of Games
Speculates on upcoming trends: AR/VR, ARGs, educational games, gamification, and the future potential of interactive media.
Module 15 · Team Design Activities
Encourages brainstorming, creative exploration, and collaborative design through a series of team-based exercises.
Module 16 · Supplementary Topics
A grab-bag of extras including debugging, Unity quirks, FSM examples, volume partitioning, and game industry insights.
💬 Class Participation & Interaction
About half of the course centers around a team project with regular deliverables and check-ins. Ed Discussion and office hours weren’t used. The individual milestones were relatively straightforward—especially coming off the more challenging Game AI course I had taken the previous semester.
💭 Final Thoughts
This course was very inspiring. You could tell the TAs loved the class, several even mentioned it was their favorite class in the OMSCS program. It left me inspired about game development, and I’ve since spent my free time exploring different game engines and building games of my own.