“Advanced Game Studio” is a semester-long game development project course, offered by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

This 12-credit course is a Game Design elective for the IDeATe, the Integrative Design, Arts & Technology Network at Carnegie Mellon, which offers undergraduate minors and courses in areas that merge technology and creativity to provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. IDeATe courses are open to students of all majors.

Advanced Game Studio was first launched in Spring 2018 to offer Game Design students an opportunity to create more in-depth and refined games by providing a longer development cycle than what other courses typically offered. Students work in teams to create a single product over the semester – designing, prototyping, testing, and refining their games, with frequent evaluation and feedback points throughout the semester.

Each year, the focus of the course is slightly different, representing a new challenge or configuration. In 2018, students created games to meet client needs & specifications. In 2019, the course focused on VR gaming with each team tasked with a different headset for development.

In 2020, the course was reconfigured to create a custom VR game for the 100th anniversary of the CMU Buggy Race. Rather than organize into smaller teams, the students collectively tackled this as one large independent game studio, with specialized groups for Art, Programming, Design, and Leadership. When the pandemic forced us to pivot to remote development, the VR experience was re-imagined as a web-based racer, Buggy All-Stars. (you can play the game here!)

Still remote in 2021, we decided to build on the success of the previous year by revisiting the buggy game but with a focus on fun casual gameplay ala Mario-Kart. 19 students came together to form another indie game studio and produced Buggy All-Stars 2: Bigger, Badder, Buggier (also available to play online).

In 2022, we were once again in-person, and converted the class back into smaller development teams. This time, students were challenged with designing multiplayer experiences with asymmetric gameplay, where a difference between player or interaction methods must be balanced or resolved.

And that brings us to 2023… this semester students will be developing augmented reality games for mobile platforms. We are excited to be experimenting with new platforms such as the Lightship API, and seeing what possibilities this offers to spatial gameplay.

About the Instructor

Tom Corbett is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon. He teaches courses in game development, VR/AR production, and related immersive and spatial technology platforms. Tom was an associate producer for Electronic Arts where he managed the development of games for experimental streaming platforms and custom VR/AR experiences. He was also the associate director of the AT&T Adworks Lab, and before that has worked in video game development, interactive exhibit design, 3D animation, distance learning, and architecture. He is a graduate of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech, and the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.