Technology Team basic concepts
There are many key technologies in addition to Software Engineering that you may need while developing your games.
Each technology team will research the state of the art on one topic area and report their findings.
This will be done as in-class presentations rather than written reports to facilitate cross-team communication.
Generally, BS CSE and CIS students should stick to topics useful for implementing games
while BA CIS students may instead opt to look into topics in their related field core (ex: business, art tools, game design, etc.)
As you will be taking on the mantle of "scientist" or "engineer" with your degree, your presentations should demonstrate a key quality of at least one of those titles.
A computer scientist should be able to clearly and concisely explain an algorithm in such a way that their peers can implement it.
A software engineer should be able to clearly and concisely explain the trade-offs to different design choices so that their peers can determine which to choose to meet their requirements/constraints.
List of possible game Technology Team topics (not exhaustive)
- Evaluting games (fun, immersion, profit, etc.)
- Illumination and lighting (ex: ambient occlusion)
- Procedural content (tiling, grammars, specific use-cases, etc.)
- Level/scene data structures (bsp-tree, terrain, voxels, etc.)
- Shaders and/or special effects
- Weather and simulation
- Camera models and controllers
- Physics
- Specific physics tasks (ex: breakable walls, ragdolls)
- Sound and music
- Networking, multiplayer, streaming
- Alternative Input Controls (vision, motion, etc.)
- Head Tracking and VR
- AI techniques (other than basic pathfinding)
- Console and GPU hardware
- Motion capture
- Animation use cases (ex: climbing a ladder)
- Animated fluids (water, lava) like oceans and waterfalls
- Human-Computer Interaction (ex: face, body, motion recognition)
- Financial issues in game development
Except for graphics and AI, which we are requiring everyone to be experts
on, all team members are expected to have a passing knowledge of all areas.
Each team should designate one member to be their lead for each sub-area. All
leads in a particular area/technology will work together with the rest of
their team to make a presentation.
Class Presentation
Each presentation should take 45-55 minutes, including questions.
Larger teams (5+) will need to make two presentations.
Presentation content may include:
- History of the topic in older games
- Examples from current games
- Toolkits available
- Toolkit comparison
- Issues to consider when using this technology in a game setting
- A more detailed overview and introduction to the selected toolkit for the course
- A few sample Use Cases, the problems they present and how they might be solved
- Code snippets for the selected toolkit (there may be several of these)
- Basic usage
- Advanced usage
- 45-55 minutes including questions
Technology Team Assignments - Spring 2023
Technology |
Members |
Materials |
Presentation(s) |
Topic |
Team members
|
|
slides and any other materials |
|
Technology Team Assignments - Spring 2016
Technology Team Assignments - Autumn 2015
Technology |
Members |
Materials |
Presentation |
Illumination |
Aaron E.
Austin
|
|
|
Shaders |
Matt
Trevor
Paul
Jessica
|
|
|
Networking |
James
Blaine
Patrick
|
|
|
AI |
Taumer
Katie
Jeff
|
|
|
Procedural Content Generation |
Bob
Michael
Steve
Tylor
|
Sample Project |
|
Sound |
Joe
Alex
Aaron C.
|
|
|
|
Technology Team Assignments - Spring 2015
Technology |
Members |
Presentation
I |
Presentation II |
Physics |
Isaac
John
Ross
Zachary |
|
  |
VR |
Tyler
Jacob
Matt T.
|
|
  |
Weather and Simulation |
Paul
Derek
Alan
Taylor
|
|
  |
Image Processing |
Doug
Phil
Zack
|
|
  |
AI |
Matt M.
Kevin L.
Ben
RJ
Cameron
|
|
|
Sound and Music |
Peter K.
Peter F.
Joey
Darren
Chris
|
|
|
Game History and Design |
Dan
Mitchell
Alex
Kelsie
Kevin M.
Kevin S.
Marshall
|
|
|
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