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Brian Schrank, PhD Associate Professor, Chair of Game Design, DePaul University bschrank@gmail.com |
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| Games & Book | AR & VR Games | Animation & Acting | Comics & Design |
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Virtual Reality Game Development Course I devised: In this workshop students cultivate the skills to design, program, and develop VR (virtual reality) games. Students learn about the unique affordances and design opportunities inherent to the platform. Topics include the history of VR, VR art, as well as toy design and development. Students collaboratively develop cutting-edge VR toys and games using the studio model in which each student adopts a professional role on the team such as programmer, designer, and artist. Class time consists of lectures, workshops, workdays, playtests, critiques, and class discussions. |
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Capstone: Game Development Project I & II I revised and teach a senior and grad-level project course for students in the Game Dev program at DePaul. They work in cross-disciplinary teams of 3-7 students for two quarters going through the entire game development cycle. They iteratively develop a game that has at least one minute of awesome gameplay. We throw a showcase at the end of the year and invite local game industry folks to come see and play the incredible games the students have made. Class website for Winter 2015 |
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Augmented Reality Game Development Course I devised: In this workshop students cultivate the skills to design, program and develop augmented reality (AR) games. Students learn about the unique affordances and design opportunities inherent to the platform. Based on the studio model, each student adopts a role on the development team, such as programmer, designer, and artist, and each is responsible for contributing professional work consistently each week. Because the platform of AR games presents unique challenges to developers (players often feel disoriented or over-tasked) teams first create a dozen AR toys, and build up the most promising experiences into games. Class time consists of lectures, workshops, workdays, playtests, critiques, and class discussions. |
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Playgramming Course I devised when we revamped the game design degree curriculum at DePaul toward more project-based learning. The course empowers game designers and artists to learn how to code and establish a foundation of procedural literacy and curiosity. |
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Art Games: From Indie to Avant-garde Course I devised: Students learn to create, appreciate and advance games as an artistic medium in this workshop. Art games challenge the conventional wisdom of what games are, why and how we play them, who can make them, and the role they perform in popular culture. “Art” has different roles in culture, from the formal and aesthetic to the political or confrontational. Students will survey the field of art games to understand how they may advance the medium in different ways through innovative, experimental, or critical play. Students will iteratively develop a series of art games (paper or digital) throughout the course. In addition, they will play and critique games made by today's leading independent and avant-garde artists. No prior experience or knowledge is required. |
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Advanced Game Design Course I co-devised with Katie Salen: Students work in teams to design and develop slices of polished, small-scale gameplay experiences. The focus is on developing team-based creative and technical processes to produce innovative, engaging, and playable games. Teams iteratively develop two distinct gameplay experiences or “vertical slices,” the first in the genre of surreal horror, and the other in the genre of comedy. Because comedy isn’t a prominent genre in games, students are responsible for developing the language, patterns, and aesthetics of the genre itself. |
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Game Mod Workshop I revised the syllabus in this studio course in which students develop skills in game design and production. Students form into mini game studios that build a game mod which must provide one awesome minute of gameplay. The entire development process is covered from brainstorming and prototyping to playtesting and polish. (image to left is from the student team: Air Five Games) class website: www.gamemodworkshop.com |
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Principles
of Visual Design I devised the syllabus in this studio course in which students develop skills to conceptualize and design media with clarity of vision and desired effect. Through readings, lectures and in-class discussions students will learn how to be critical of their own work, the work of others and how to analyze interactive and static imagery from various historical and theoretical perspectives. class website ------- gallery of student work |
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Construction of the Moving Image: Animation Concentration I devised the syllabus for this studio course which combines theories of animation, video and film with practice in these fields. Class material consists of lectures, workshops, readings, projects, and in-class critiques of their such projects. Students learn the affordances, aesthetics and techniques of how to create moving images that are hand drawn, generated computationally in 2D or 3D, and that are layered motion graphics. Software used: Maya, Photoshop, Processing and After Effects. class website ------- gallery of student work |
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Introduction to Media Studies I devised the syllabus in this lecture course in which students develop skills to engage contemporary and historical media through various critical lenses including production practices, support technologies, relationships with culture and politics. Students read canonical texts from the field and employ them in their own analysis of media artifacts in essay form, in-class discussions, and oral reports. The goal for students is to gain agency over our contemporary mediascape, and be able to think about, debate and critique media artifacts and events with a versatile and rich theoretical toolset. |
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Building Virtual Worlds Videos of student work: |
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InTEL: Interactive Toolkit for Engineering Learning
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Korea Game Academy |
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Full-Immersion
English |
