Some changes have been made to the Monday afternoon Skills Workshops being offered in November.
The revised schedule is as follows:
November 3 Design for Online Games, Part 1
November 10 NO skills workshop
November 17 Panda 3D
November 24 Design for Online Games Part II
December 1 PS3/Gambryo
Workshops take place from 1 to 5pm on Monday afternoons in ZML
Changes:
*3 November: Peter Preuss’s Quartz Composer has been postponed until next semester.
*10 November: There will be NO skills workshop.
*24 November: Jeffrey Kaplan, the lead designer for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (and a designer who’s been on the project since the original WoW) will be attending and providing a post-mortem.
For the complete revised schedule, including descriptions of individual workshops, please look after the break.
:
Please RSVP for each Monday workshop by the Friday preceding. Please rsvp to dmtucker at usc dot edu; I will reply to confirm your participation.
November 3
Design for Online Games, Part 1
Instructor: Al Yang
NB: If you have a PC, please bring it (to allow us to accommodate as many people as possible)
1-2:30pm: Introduction to online games (history, milestones, play in online worlds, etiquette, other online worlds, extending the online experience).
2:45-5pm: Warhammer Online. Discussion, play (break into groups, according to MMO experience) and further discussion of the world, narrative and themes, interface and UI, social interaction, etc.
Attendees receive copy of Warhammer Online, which comes with one free month of play. Sign-ups available, so that players have additional time to get familiar with the game systems.
November 10: NO SKILLS WORKSHOP
November 17
Panda 3D
Instructor: Bei Yang
Panda 3d is a free open source fully-featured 3D game engine that is both powerful and flexible. Learn some of the basics, and about its strengths and weaknesses in this introduction. Through this workshop, students will quickly learn to use Panda3D to create stereoscopic environments that utilize a 20′ by 20′ motion capture system and a wide field-of-view HMD at the Institute for Creative Technologies IRSTAGE at and at the Flower Street Co-Design lab.
November 24
Design for Online Games Part II
Instructor: Al Yang
Special Guest: Jeffrey Kaplan: lead designer for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
1-1:30pm Questions and brief overview for newcomers. Further discussions of core UI.
2-3pm: Play World of Warcraft (trial)
3-4pm: Play Maple Story (full game, free, microtransactions)
4-5pm: Discuss, with lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan, thematic and differences in gameplay WOW, Warhammer and Maple Story. Discussion of Asian vs Western gameplay design (themes, UI, gameplay, business model, microtransactions. Transmedia and the growth of the market in Asia vs transmedia here (Lord of the Rings Online).
December 1
PS3/Gambryo
Instructor: Todd Furmanski
This workshop will provide a quick survey of sample code from both systems. Demonstration of a scene developed in Maya and converted into a format readable in real-time by Gamebryo. Building a project as a Playstation 3 executable that can be run on the development kit. Various available effects and procedures involved in conversion and runtime.