Computer Science (COMP) 283

Overview

Games need stories and background settings to engage users. Myths and facts (e.g., a story line, images, dress, armour, weapons, tools) are essential to developers creating a game story.

In this course students create a high-interactivity website to present a game idea that they have researched based on myths and ancient history. They design and build web pages to tell the story of their dream game using HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript with multimedia resources they have searched out on the Internet. At the end of this course, students will have an interactive website presenting the story and facts for a dream game.

COMP 283 can be an excellent complementary course to COMP 230, Storyboard Design, which is another course essential for anyone to pursue a competitive credential in game design and development, such as the University Certificate in Game Development and Programming to be offered by School of Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University.

Course Objectives

The objective is for students to apply basic concepts and skills using HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript to create a high-interactivity website. At the same time, they will develop their ability to research literature and resources about the myths, facts, and history chosen as the foundation of their dream game. Students will sharpen their web page development skills by creating a website to present the story and facts of the game. At the end of this course, they will demonstrate their competence in web page creation and website design in a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to

• use the people, events and facts of a chosen myth and/or history to develop the background for a game OR develop a comprehensive original fictional context containing a history or mythology for a game.
• research important literature and texts of a chosen myth or history using online resources such as the AU Library and Google.
• create, describe and integrate settings, characters and action in as cohesive interactive storyline.
• critically survey and summarize a chosen myth and/or history for use in game design.
• use document and presentation design skills to produce elements of the game design and description including fact tables, written descriptions, story boards and timelines.
• use web design tools and techniques to create multimedia web pages.
• present and explain the game design concept in a presentation.

Outline

The course consists of the following study guide units:

• Unit 0: Getting Started – Software and Searching
• Unit 1: Structuring Documents and Links on the Web
• Unit 2: Adding Images, Audio, and Video
• Unit 3: Using Tables
• Unit 4: Using Form Components
• Unit 5: Using Frames
• Unit 6: Even Better – Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Unit 7: Website Design
• Unit 8: Using Simple JavaScript
• Unit 9: Publishing Your Website

Evaluation

To receive credit for COMP 283, you must achieve a course composite grade of at least D (50 percent), with an average grade of at least 60 percent for Assignment 1, 2, and 4, a grade of at least 50 percent for Assignment 3, and a grade of at least 60 percent for the Final Online Presentation. The weighting of the composite grade is as follows:

To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University's online Calendar.