Hello again! This week, I want to take some time out to show you what my favorite class is here at USC. If you haven’t guessed yet from my earlier posts (here, here, and here), my favorite class here is ITP 280: Video Game Production. If you have a love for video games or any desire to learn more about the business, why video games are appealing, or how one could develop a video game, then this is the class for you.
So what is this class anyway? ITP 280 is an entry level class for Video Game Programming and several digital design majors, but is open to all majors. In my class alone there are programmers, artists, business majors, music majors, and more! It centers around studying the pipeline for producing video games from start to finish. We learn about concepts such as agile and SCRUM development and why Pac-Man was so successful. We look at current trending games like League of Legends and Candy Crush to see how they make money, how they got started, and why they are so successful.
I love this class because everything we do is exciting. Rather than lectures, we have discussions with the class where we’ll go back and forth with the professor and play games on the projector. We play group games in class like Sissy Fight to understand how user behavior radically changes what a game is. For our labs, we learned how to use Game Maker, a game making tool, and recreated a classic video game in four weeks! Just yesterday, we had a game jam in class and made an entire video game (or at least proof of concept!) in an hour and a half. You can watch a preview of my team, Team Jamini’s, submission that went on to win our class competition here.
I’ve always loved playing video games – Pokemon was a staple in my early years. Video Game Production gave me a chance to learn more about one of my passions and did a great job of turning the broad field of video games into something that is fun and easy to understand. I’m really looking forward to continuing my classes for my Games minor, and if anything in regards to video games and game theory sounds intriguing to you I encourage you to try this class!
