The Full Sail Experience: Part III
Game Design and Development Bachelor of Science Degree
fullsail@ayrik.com
Month 15 - September 2005
Engine Development (Month 1)
• Instructor: Ben Quintero
• Grade: 92% (B)*
• Materials: Real-Time Rendering
When we all first came into this class we figured that we would be taught how to build an engine from scratch and different ways you can structure a game engine, but what we were taught instead are little tools to build for your game engine. We built a low-level memory manager and learned how to write a bounding volume hierarchy. Throughout the course there is a research project you are to be working on at home and in some labs. However, with the stress of Game Networking there is little that can be done on that.
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Game Networking
• Instructor: Jared Carpenter
• Grade: 96% (A)*
• Materials: Unix Network Programming, Vol. 1: The Sockets Networking API, Third Edition
This class is exactly what it sounds, you learn to program a networked game. First you learn the concepts and structures of a network, and then you learn about TCP sockets, and later UDP sockets. Also you learn about the new IPv6 and probably a few other things I can't remember. Good class, lots of work to be done and very stressfull.
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Month 16 - October 2005
Engine Development (Month 2, see above)
Software Architecture
• Instructor: Shaimaa Elkhawalka
• Grade: 93% (B)*
• Materials: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Even the title of this class sounds boring, so I wasn't really expecting much. During the first few days of class you learn about a few design patterns and use Visual Paradigm to chart things out. Visual Paradigm was integrated right into Visual Studio and had so many bugs in it that most of the people in the class could never finish their work. Most of the class you are just deriving a bunch of classes from each other, but you also learn useful ways of scheduling and project management such as Extreme Programming, etc.
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Month 17 - November 2005
Final Project Begins!
General Design Fundamentals 2
• Instructor: Michelle Wess
• Grade: 94% (B)*
• Materials: n/a
This class focuses on the design aspect of your final project and acts as a side class to the class below, Game Pre-Production (GPP). Expect more of the first class but with a lot of presenting. While going through this class, in addition to GPP, I felt like we were presenting every single day. Still, this class provides you with a break from all the technical stuff since they don't allow you to code at all.
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Game Pre-Production
• Instructor: Liam Hislop
• Grade: 96% (A)*
• Materials: Project Management (The Briefcase Book Series) and Rapid Development
Ah, the infamous game pitches. Essentially, the first day the come in and tell you to split into teams of 4 to 6 however you want and leave the room. When they come back and everyone is in their teams, they start lecturing on team stuff and how the class is run. Later on they tell you that you need two game designs by the end of the week (typically 3 days) and that you will need to pitch them both in front of a bunch of people a few days later. We pitched the game we wanted and another but ended up with the one we didn't want. The rest of the month is spent creating the game design document as a team.
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*Grading Scale
Letter Grade is based on Full Sail's more difficult grading scale
Full Sail Grading Scale
A 95 - 100
B 85 - 94
C 75 - 84
D 70 - 74
F 0 - 69
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U of U CS Grading Scale
A 90 - 100
B 80 - 89
C 70 - 79
D 60 - 69
F 0 - 59
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