Computer Science CS 370
Computer Game Design
Spring 2004

 

Course Information: 
Location: CS Classroom 381 (CS Department, 1890 Maple Avenue)
Time: Tuesday and Thursday 3:30-4:50pm

Instructor: 
Ken Forbus 
Computer Science Department
1890 Maple Avenue, Room 300 
forbus@northwestern.edu 
(847) 491-7699 
Office hours: By appointment

Teaching Assistant:
Greg Dunham
Computer Science Department
1890 Maple Avenue, Room 356
gdunham@northwestern.edu
(847) 467-1869
Office hours: TBD

Announcements:

·         5/10/04:  The Dungeon Siege homework has been broken into two pieces.  This week, you only need to turn in the terrain for your quest and your design document.  Two weeks from Thursday, the entire quest will be due.   Please see the revised homework assignment for details.  Also remember, next week are the term project progress presentations.  You will have to turn in your PowerPoint slides from those presentations next Thursday.

·         4/19/04: As some of you are aware, we have had some glitches with email systems filtering out zip archives that contain homework assignments.  We think this is now mostly under control.  But given the difficulty in getting the games back out to you, we are making the due date of this assignment to be April 29th, two weeks instead of one week.  However, we are also giving you another assignment on the 22nd (i.e., your term project proposal) which will also be due on the 29th, so please take that into consideration.

·         4/19/04: Some of you have had trouble logging into the course newsgroup.  For some reason the newsgroup server is a bit cranky, and wants qualified domain names, i.e., CS\<your normal username here>.  Please let us know of that does not work for you.

 

Course materials

Resources:

Communications:

  • There will be a class newsgroup on the Departmental news server, news.cs.northwestern.edu for announcements, help, and discussions.
  • To submit homework assignments, please use the address cs370-staff@cs.northwestern.edu. Also please use this address for private questions to Ken or Greg about course-related matters.  This helps ensure a timely response because we both will see it.
  • Please remember to check this web site often for updates, and use the reload command on your browser to ensure that you are receiving the most up-to-date information.  
  • Important note: Learning design skills is often best done in a group setting, where problems that arise during the design process are discussed in a studio setting.   Part of class time will be devoted to discussing design problems that you are finding in doing homework assignments, so please bring partial solutions and ideas to discuss to class.  It will save time if you bring in your code on a floppy disk, USB flash memory or CD rather than relying on network connections, so we can look at it together on-screen.
  • If we need to pass out restricted-distribution materials, we will use Northwestern's Blackboard course management system.  Otherwise, we'll use the more accessible and straightforward media detailed above.

Examples of student work from previous years:


Last edited 4/1/04 by KDF
Please send suggestions to cs370-staff@cs.northwestern.edu.
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