teaching machines

CS 491: Meeting 7 – Smooth Movement and Projectiles

Dear students: In your prototypes last week, we saw that all of our games are going to involve physical interactions between objects. At the end of our last lab we were manually positioning our players, which meant that we could walk through walls. Also, the movement was jerky. In today’s lab, we look at how […]

CS 491: Meeting 3 – Joystick

Dear students: We have formed teams and are hashing out game ideas. Some of us are feeling the repressed artist inside of us wake up to the call of pixel art. We should keep that progress going. Right after a lab exercise! Exercise Let’s make a game—one that uses a two-axis joystick. We’ll move an […]

CS 491: Meeting 2

Dear students: Today is our first workday. You and your team will spend the time hashing out ideas, discussing one anothers’ strengths and interests, and coming up with a plan. In particular, these are some things to do during class today: Inform your instructor of your studio’s name and employees. He will make a private […]

CS 491: Project Milestones

This semester you and your team will be dropped into a box. Calories will be dropped in one side of the box, and a game will pop out the other. To help structure your progress, your box is actually expected to pop out four versions of your game in various stages of completion. These milestones […]

CS 491: Meeting 1 – Push Button

Dear students: Welcome to CS 491! The Registrar doesn’t really give this elective class a name, but between you and me, I’m calling it Game Development and Physical Computing. The Game Development part means we’re going to be making games. The Physical Computing part means we’re going to be assembling hardware. That hardware will sense […]

CS 491 – Game Development and Physical Computing

Course Information Syllabus Enrollment: 20 Posts Project

CS 491: Lecture 5 – Pathlete Continued

Dear students: Today we don’t introduce any new hardware, but we do explore a common mechanism for designing levels: text assets. Unity’s drag-n-drop editor is great, but some times ASCII does the job more quickly. We’ll use a plain text editor to lay out levels for Pathlete, the game we started last week. We’ll also […]

CS 491: Lecture 4 – Pathlete

Dear students: Today we implement a little puzzle game inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening: To make this happen, we’ll use an analog joystick to direct the platform. These commonly have five pins: voltage, ground, a horizontal analog pin, a vertical analog pin, and a digital button pin. Let’s hook up circuit like […]

CS 491: Lecture 3 – Peggle

Dear students: Last time we started working on a game of Peggle. The real thing is full of glitz. We’ll keep working on ours today, but it won’t quite match the professionals: I’ve expanded our controller a bit so it has both a push button switch to fire and a potentiometer to aim the cannon. […]

CS 491: Lecture 2 – Potentiometer

Dear students: Last time we used a push button to make a game where we reversed the spin of a planet. Today we implement a crude game of Peggle. We’ll discuss potentiometers and physics. We’ll use the potentiometer to aim the cannon. Potentiometers are rotary sensors that are useful for gathering inputs that fall into […]

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