Syllabus

This course picks up where Harvard College’s CS50 leaves off, focusing on the development of 2D and 3D interactive games. Students explore the design of such childhood games as Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, and Portal in a quest to understand how video games themselves are implemented. Via lectures and hands-on projects, the course explores principles of 2D and 3D graphics, animation, sound, and collision detection using frameworks like LÖVE2D and Unity, as well as languages like Lua and C#. By class’s end, students will have programmed several of their own games and gained a thorough understanding of the basics of game design and development.

Prerequistes

CSCI E-50, CS50x, or prior programming experience in any language.

Instructors

Colton Ogden
cogden@cs50.harvard.edu

David J. Malan
malan@harvard.edu

Schedule

Lectures

Pong

• Lua
• LÖVE2D
• Basic OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)
• Drawing Shapes
• Drawing Text
• DeltaTime and Velocity
• Game State
• Box Collision (Hitboxes)
• Sound Effects (with bfxr)

Flappy Bird

• Images (Sprites)
• Infinite Scrolling
• “Games are Illusions”
• Procedural Generation
• State Machines
• Music
• Mouse Input

Breakout

• Sprite Sheets
• Procedural Layouts
• Levels
• Player Health (Loss Conditions)
• Particle Systems
• Collision Detection Revisited
• Persistent Save Data

Match 3

• Anonymous Functions
• Tweening
• Timers
• Solving Matches
• Procedural Grids
• Sprite Art and Palettes

Super Mario Bros.

• Tile Maps
• 2D Animation
• Procedural Level Generation
• Platformer Physics
• Intro to AI
• Powerups

Legend of Zelda

• Top-Down Perspective
• Infinite Dungeon Generation
• Events
• Hurtboxes
• Screen Scrolling
• Data-Driven Design

Angry Birds

• Box2D
• Mouse Input

Pokémon

• StateStacks
• GUIs
• Turn-Based Systems
• RPG Mechanics

Helicopter Game 3D

• Unity 3D and Editor
• C#
• Blender
• Components
• Colliders and Triggers
• Prefabs and Spawning
• Texture Scrolling
• Audio

Dreadhalls

• Texturing
• Materials and Lighting
• 3D Maze Generation
• First-Person Controllers
• Multiple Scenes
• Fog
• UI Components and Unity2D

Portal

• Raycasting
• Texture Decals
• Render to Texture
• Projectiles
• 3D Physics
• VR with Unity

Guest Lecture

• Portal Problems, with Dave Kircher and Tejeev Kohli of Valve Software

Expectations

You are expected to

• watch twelve lectures online,
• submit eleven assignments online, and
• submit one final project online.

Grades

Final grades will be based on assignments (65%) and the final project (35%).

Assignments and the final project are evaluated along axes of correctness, design, and style, with scores ordinarily computed as 3 × correctness + 2 × design + 1 × style. Scores are normalized across teaching fellows at term’s end, so mid-semester comparisons among students of scores are not reliable indicators of standing.

Lectures

Via lectures are the course’s concepts introduced every week. Lectures will be filmed during the semester and can be watched on demand anytime.

Sections

Lectures are supplemented by weekly, 90-minute sections led by the teaching fellows, led both online and in person. Sections are an opportunity to discuss the course’s material, ask questions, and explore related material.

Office Hours

Office hours are opportunities for guidance and feedback from the staff on assignments as well as for discussion of the course’s material more generally.

Homework

Homework comes in the form of small weekly assignments, for which the goal is to modify the game demonstrated in class that week in some way.

Late Policy

For each minute that an assignment is turned in late, the course will impose a 0.01% deduction on your grade for the project. (Therefore, a project that is a week late will earn no credit at all.) Only in extenuating circumstances will exceptions be considered.

Late work will not be accepted for the final project.

Academic Honesty

This course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as “be reasonable.” The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on assigned projects is not permitted except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your code to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints. Collaboration on the course’s final project is permitted to the extent prescribed by its specification.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from the course’s heads. Acts considered not reasonable by the course are handled harshly. If the course refers some matter for disciplinary action and the outcome is punitive, the course reserves the right to impose local sanctions on top of that outcome that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted or for the course itself. The course ordinarily recommends exclusion (i.e., required withdrawal) from the course itself.

If you commit some act that is not reasonable but bring it to the attention of the course’s heads within 72 hours, the course may impose local sanctions that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted, but the course will not refer the matter for further disciplinary action except in cases of repeated acts.

Reasonable

• Communicating with classmates about projects in English (or some other spoken language).
• Discussing the course’s material with others in order to understand it better.
• Helping a classmate identify a bug in his or her code at office hours, elsewhere, or even online, as by viewing, compiling, or running his or her code, even on your own computer.
• Incorporating a few lines of code that you find online or elsewhere into your own code, provided that those lines are not themselves solutions to projects and that you cite the lines’ origins.
• Sending or showing code that you’ve written to someone, possibly a classmate, so that he or she might help you identify and fix a bug.
• Sharing a few lines of your own code online so that others might help you identify and fix a bug.
• Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted previously to this course, CS50 AP, or CS50x.
• Turning to the web or elsewhere for instruction beyond the course’s own, for references, and for solutions to technical difficulties, but not for outright solutions to projects.
• Whiteboarding solutions to projects with others using diagrams or pseudocode but not actual code.
• Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you.

Not Reasonable

• Accessing a solution to some project to (re-)submitting your own.
• Asking a classmate to see his or her solution to a project before (re-)submitting your own.
• Decompiling, deobfuscating, or disassembling the staff’s solutions to projects.
• Failing to cite (as with comments) the origins of code or techniques that you discover outside of the course’s own lessons and integrate into your own work, even while respecting this policy’s other constraints.
• Giving or showing to a classmate a solution to a project when it is he or she, and not you, who is struggling to solve it.
• Paying or offering to pay an individual for work that you may submit as (part of) your own.
• Searching for or soliciting outright solutions to projects online or elsewhere.
• Splitting an assigned project’s workload with another individual and combining your work.
• Submitting (after possibly modifying) the work of another individual beyond the few lines allowed herein.
• Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted or will submit to another.
• Submitting work to this course that you intend to use outside of the course (e.g., for a job) without prior approval from the course’s heads.
• Viewing another’s solution to a project and basing your own solution on it.