Time & Location

Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:30 PM - 5:50 PM at Lathrop 282
Tuesday lectures are in conjunction with CS 544: Interactive Media and Games

Course Description

This project-based course provides an introduction to game design covering topics like 2D/3D Art, Audio, User Interfaces, Production, Narrative Design, Marketing, and Publishing. Speakers from the profession will provide relevant context during a weekly seminar. Weekly assignments include in-depth materials and require students to independently create small video games. Classroom meetings will be used to foster student project discussions, and deepen understanding of material. The course culminates with students forming project teams to create a final video game. Assignments will be completed within the Unity game development engine; prior Unity experience is not required. Given class size limitations, an online survey will be distributed before class starts and students will be selected so to achieve a diverse class composition.

CS 146 Vision

“My vision for the students is that they have the opportunity to work with talented peers, learn from world-class indie and AAA developers, and build a fun product by the end of the quarter.” 
--Tom Wang (Riot Games)​

Course Goals

We hope that students find the skills they learn in CS146 to be broadly applicable whether they later choose to pursue academia, build a startup, join the games industry, or anything else. I also hope through CS146 students will develop a deeper understanding of products, design, and the people who enjoy them - a valuable complement to the technical skills they learn from other CS courses.

We believe that product + design + teamwork is the key aspect of the course that remains valuable well into the future. It happens that video games are an ideal medium and Unity is a flexible prototyping engine; however, learning these is a secondary goal compared to the primary objective of training product-minded engineers.