Resources
Development Tools
- create a jetbrains student account to get the professional jetbrains products for free.
- Jetbrains Toolbox I recommend you use jetbrains toolbox to manage your IDEs
- Get Git you need git to turn in projects for this class., It is likely pre-installed on Linux, and will install with the mac xcode command line tools. You will definitely need to install it yourself on windows though.
- VSCode is not too terrible on the gopigo robots
Game Assets
You will need assets for your game. Here are a few places to get those assets from:
- Open Game Art Is a good start since the art is free. It is a bit more limited though.
- Game Dev Market Is a nice source of game art and sounds, but most of it costs money
- Itch.io also has a nice game asset store Many of the assets have a 'name your price' approach
- Kenney assets is a "free but please donate" model site with lots of game assets available.
- Humble Bundle Several times a year Humble Bundle has game assets bundles available. It does cost money, but you can get a lot of stuff for a small amount of Money. Most of the assets I use in class were acquired this way.
- A tiny little zip file of tiles for our tiled map session a few weeks into the semester.
- Two images for the second week of class:
and 
Game Specific Tools:
You will need tools to make your games.
- Tiled Map editor Later in the semester we will look at tiled maps, the de facto standard for indie and open source games (not Unity or Unreal) is this tiled map editor
- Gimp is a great image editor if you need to modify the art assets
- Large Language Models are currently all the rage. Rather than pick one, let me just point at a tutorial for how the could be applied
Slides
From time to time I'll post my lecture slides here. They are really my notes to remind me what we need to talk about, so they are not enough by themselves, but they will hopefully be of use when paired with the notes that you take.
- Introductory Lecture
- GitHub Directions reminder
- The initial go slides
- The intro to design concepts slides
- Simple Game Programming bits
- Game Design: Players and Venues
- TiledMaps original and embedded
- The animated Sprites slides
- International Players and Game Review boards
- Intellectual property - something you work with a lot in games
- Game "AI" part I
- Pathfinding AI, Graphs, search and the beginning on fonts
- The game design bits from GameTek
- Game Systems Design from the game design book part I
- The client server and multiplayer games slides
- Physical Prototypes
- Playtesting