This program consists of eight courses, four required and four electives. Electives can be selected from game art and design or from complementary art/design subjects. Course descriptions are as follows:

Required


• Maya Basics: Unlock the mysteries of this challenging program. You’ll develop a thorough understanding of the Maya toolset, learning how to create, edit, and refine polygon models, add textures, apply UV maps, and develop basic animations. Class projects include working with primitives, complex inorganic models, character modeling, texturing, studying animations, and exporting a scene.
  
  
• Tiling Textures: Focus on developing tiling textures for 3D environments. Tiling textures, the design of repeated textures for 3D environments, is an essential part of any game artist’s job. In this class, you’ll focus exclusively on developing tiling textures for 3D environments. You’ll explore how to create tiles that are the appropriate format and resolution for game engines, removing distracting detail and testing your work as you go. You’ll study how to address the specific requirements of organic and geometric textures, perspective, and lighting, and learn about the different maps that game developers use to deploy tiling textures.
  
  
• Game Lighting and Color: Learn the lighting standards and techniques that shape today’s game environments. You’ll master the basic vocabulary, tools, and controls used to produce lighting effects in 2D and 3D imaging programs. Then you’ll tackle the advanced shading and texturing techniques that can bring realism or depth to surfaces. As you learn the applications of fundamental lighting and color technology in Photoshop and Maya, game art pro Jesse Brophy will keep you focused on the artistic, and technical aspects of game lighting: how color and lighting shapes the emotion of a character or scene, how it affects the player’s experience, and how lighting requires tradeoffs in the design process.
  
  
• Character Animation: Learn how to apply the classic principles of character animation to 3D models using Autodesk Maya. In six hands-on lessons, character animation phenom Cristin McKee guides you through 14 principles of animation ranging from squash and stretch and anticipated movement to the expression of personality and thought. Using Maya’s high-level animation tools, you’ll gain insight into the professional animator’s approach, learning to work with hierarchical characters, create effective poses, properly time your shots, develop advanced walk cycles, and even make your characters think.
  
  Electives
  
  
• Character Setup and Rigging: Develop key technical skills for 3D character setup, learning how to build, rig, skin, and pose character models, and test them for animation. You’ll walk through the process of creating joints to assemble a skeleton, fine-tuning joints for realistic motion, rigging bodies and faces, and binding your character’s skin to its skeleton. Each practical project uses Autodesk Maya and helps you prepare your character models for the ultimate goal: animation.
  
  
• Game Analysis and Criticism: Learn how to analyze and criticize video games, identifying key elements in a game and making intelligent judgments about whether games succeed or fail. The ability to think, talk, and write about what makes games work is vital to making it in the game development industry. In this course, you’ll develop your critical and communication skills, learning how to recognize what art and gameplay features are important in a game, how to evaluate a game through its designer’s objectives, and what features the critics and players are looking for.
  
  
• Intro to Game Development:Gain an insight into every aspect of how today’s video games are created. You’ll learn about the business model, the technology platform, the production process, and the genres that define the medium, developing an understanding of the people and processes that drive development. A major goal of the course is to help you understand the different roles in game art and design departments. You’ll explore the inner workings of the game development team, finding out how art, programming, audio, design, and QA work together to create a killing product.
  
  
• History of Video Games: Develop a deep historical understanding for the game industry. You’ll study important issues that every aspiring developer should understand such as what business factors led to the rise and fall of the first consoles, and how Nintendo’s approach to licensing set the stage for today’s system of third party software development, how fierce competition between manufacturers spurred the industry’s growth and which games brought about true game design and gameplay.
  
  
• Game Design Documents: Writing a design document is the single most important skill for a game designer to master. In this three-lesson course, you’ll learn how to create an overview, a proposal, and a sample design document for your very own hot game concept. You’ll learn how designers use formal documentation to develop a concept and pitch it to business managers and game development teams. Practical exercises help you detail every aspect of the game—art, audio, programming, interface, and more.
  
  
• Art and Design Electives include: Color Theory, Design and Composition, Figure Drawing, History of Art, Photoshop Basics, Photoshop Advanced, Digital Photography I, Digital Photography II.
  
  

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