Launch
Your launch week is the chance get to know your peers and start working collaboratively.
Expressive Game Design
From basic design tools to conceptualizing, prototyping and critically play testing games, you will be able to craft and formalise game systems tailored towards end user engagement. Within this unit you will design and prototype compelling game mechanics for immersive play, which can support a given message, or meaning other than for commercial entertainment.
In addition to learning game design methods, you will learn how to talk about and understand games, deconstructing them and working out how game mechanics create experiential spaces.
Games Research and Professional Contexts 1
In this hybrid unit, you will get the analytical tools to not only interrogate and interpret existing games and gameplay experiences in written and verbal form, but to apply what you learn to their practice in a reflective report.
You will learn to synthesise theoretical research methods and industry practices of game evaluation to provide a critically informed and reflective toolset for analysing and critically assessing games, gameplay experiences, and their practice.
You will learn about a range of methods for analysing video games on the level of their content and form drawing upon established research practices within the academy for analysing texts, images, and more recent Game Studies-specific approaches.
In tandem with this scholarly approach to research methods, the professional practice strand of this unit will provide you with industry and practitioner-led insights into how game design and art practices are analysed and assessed within the game development process. Delivered by industry insiders from a range of career stages and focuses, this element of the unit will provide opportunities for students to understand and apply industry standard best practice for evaluating games.