Bachelor of Science - Computer Games (Including Placement Year) (I610)

This is a degree in world-making. Student craft stories, characters and plot in order to build imaginary worlds that a player can journey through. Their work is driven by creativity and imagination as well as technical excellence; at Essex students master both game design and computer programming, giving them total control over the worlds they want to create. The course gives students the skills to design and specify complex, non-trivial games through focusing on the following areas:

• The mechanics of a game, including gameplay elements and the relationship with story • The concepts and techniques of computer game programming • Real and virtual worlds • Artificial intelligence behaviors for non-player characters • 2D and 3D graphic effects and game objects (e.g. weapon systems)

At the end of the course, students will be able to create the outline design specification for a computer game of their own design, and to implement a game using industry-standard techniques.

The School is a community of scholars leading the way in technological research and development. Today’s computer scientists are creative people who are focused and committed, yet restless and experimental. They are home to many of the world’s top scientists, and their work is driven by creativity and imagination as well as technical excellence.

More than two-thirds of their research rated “world-leading” or “internationally excellent” (REF 2014).

Both for entertainment and for more serious purposes such as virtual reality training, computer games, gamification and games intelligences are increasingly important in today’s world.

Programming at Essex

Teaching someone to program is about opening a door. In the first year at Essex students will study a module that introduces you to programming using Python. They assess students’ ability to think in a programmatic way in the very first week of term and if additional support is required, they offer classes which will boost students skills and confidence with programming.