FPS: Foundational Programming Skills in University Game Development;Ivan Nikolov |Aalborg University

Описание: Teaching programming can be challenging, especially for younger students. Combining that with all the necessary knowledge that is required for starting game development – understanding of lighting, physics, interactions, level design, and shaders, it can quickly become overwhelming to students. The multifaceted nature of game development makes it challenging to learn solely from traditional resources, such as books and tutorials. In addition, developing exercises can also be tricky, as it requires a balance between keeping students' attention with interesting use cases and not overwhelming them with large projects.
A powerful tool for finding such a balance is the idea of constructivism and reserve engineering, or remaking games for learning of fundamental concepts in game design, programming, and optimization. Commercial, widely known, and popular games can be seen as a treasure trove of mechanics, design principles, and good code practice from a pedagogical point of view. In this contribution, we discuss the remaking of specifically first-person shooter (FPS) games as a pedagogical instrument for learning programming and game development.
In the last 3 years, we have used FPS and first-person games as a backbone for exercise development, lecture, and course recap tools. Specifically famous landmark games like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Half-Life, Sin, Halo, F.E.A.R., and the like. We utilized these games as examples in lectures, as exercise benchmarks for students using the remake methodology, and as a recapping and inspiration tool through the collaboration with the “FPS: First Person Shooter” documentary. Through feedback from students, exploration of self-reported timesheets, and observation, we saw a large jump in interest from multiple cohorts of students from two faculties. Students reported heightened interest and desire to learn new game development skills.
We show that the combination of the popularity of first-person games with their relative complexity to implement, as well as versatility to introduce different programming and game development concepts, makes them a gold mine for idea generation, best practices, and problem-solving.