This is a project based course that teaches students how to work as a team across disciplines to create a video game. The first month of the course is focused on teaching students the basics of Unity, a game development engine, as well as the teaching students the basics of game development. There will also be 3 1-week long tutorial projects to be completed in small groups of 2-3. After learning the basics, students will pitch game ideas to the rest of the class and form teams. The last two months of the course will be spent completing these pitches (or at least the ones that had the most interest) as the final project of the course. Since this is such a large project there will be several milestone deadlines throughout the semester.

This course is designed for both programmers and artists, while other disciplines relevant to game development are welcome you must also be able to fulfill a programmer or artist role in the class. You are not required to have any prior game development experience, but we do expect you to have some basic knowledge of your discipline (see pre-requisites below).

This is going to be a very difficult and challenging class, but hopefully very rewarding. You will be expected to put in many hours a week outside of class working on projects/learning the material. Because this is a project-based class, attendance is highly recommended. To accommodate students who cannot make class time, pre-recorded video lectures will also be posted online.

Most importantly, this course is for you. We will do our best to work with students to shape and modify the course to better fit your needs as well as to make improvements to the course for future semesters. We intend to hold office hours every week to assist you with your projects or the course material, location and time to be determined.

Pre-requisites(Programmers)
-We are expecting all programmers to have taken cs61a, cs61b (can be taken concurrently). Being comfortable with basic vector math is also recommended but not required.
-A laptop capable of running Unity (should be most laptops)

Pre-requisites(Artists)
-We are expecting all artists to have experience with some kind of drawing software, your choice.
-A laptop capable of running Unity (should be most laptops)

Feel free to shoot us an email at berkeley.gamedev@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Or join us on Discord for a more laid back approach!
https://discord.gg/yaFYJxc

Enrollment will be application based. Experience level will not be a large factor in the students we pick, we will be looking for a healthy balance of inexperienced and experienced students. The application closes on Sunday January 24th, 11:59PM and decision will be sent out by Tuesday January 26th. There will be an infosession on Wednesday January 20th at 7pm. The biggest factor is going to be how passionate you are about game development as well as how much time you are willing to commit to your project. Since this is an open-ended project-based course there will have to be a lot of motivation from the students themselves, so if you aren't all that passionate about game development or you are taking a lot of other hard classes this might not be the class for you. Please be honest with us and yourself on the application form.