In the fall of 2022, a group of computer science majors met in a corner booth of Dunkin Student Center. They wanted to start a club for video-game programming. Throughout the following weeks and months, they kept on chatting, planning, and dreaming. A year later, they reaped the fruits of their work, but it was not a club — it was a class.
Dr. John Beck taught this course, called Game Design and Development, last fall at The Master’s University. For the students involved, it was a semester full of cross-discipline collaboration, detailed game construction, and a whole lot of imagination.
One of the key students from the initial group was Andrew Webberley, a sophomore computer science major who started programming games when he was 8. With the help of his friends and Dr. Beck, who is the dean of the School of Business and Communication, Webberley wrote the syllabus for the course and submitted it for approval. By the start of the semester, the course was official.
In class, Beck encouraged and guided the students as they actively designed games, drawing on his 20 years of experience in the video game industry. Each week, students split into teams of four or five to work on their individual disciplines — programming, drawing, and story-writing, for example — and then collaborate on the details. At the end, they put it all together to make a functional product.
Rather than working on one complete game, they gained experience in a wide variety of game genres by creating demos of side-scrollers, role-playing games, and tower-defense games. “Every time we’d move on, we did so with more skills,” says Webberley.
Beck also brought in guest speakers like James Chung (a developer on the Call of Duty franchise with Infinity Ward) and Voldi Way (a programmer and studio head who has developed over 100 retail products across major platforms, including Nintendo, PlayStation, and Microsoft consoles).
Beck was impressed by how devoted the class — which consisted mostly of communication and computer science majors — was to learning in a new environment.
“They’re so passionate about doing this work that they don’t require a lot of external motivation,” he says. “They’ve picked up the ball and run with it. For the students who wish to pursue a career in game design, the work from this class will serve as a valuable portfolio piece.”
Learn more about TMU’s School of Business and Communication at masters.edu/B&C.
