SLAV 2500

Half the class is about vampires and half of it is about games. The class is taught by two different professors--one teaches about vampires and the other teaches about video games. I think as someone who doesn't really game, the class isn't as engaging (content-wise) to me, but it seems like the people who do take gaming seriously think it's super fun and interesting. That being said, I do think the class is interesting and really does well with catering to all types of skills and knowledge levels for gaming. However, I'm a CS major and the final project is to build a game from one of 4 game engines (ranging from easy to hard). Currently, my friend and I are finding the learning curve of building a good game on these game engines to be pretty hard to conquer as a final project, to the point where we even wonder how other people who are not CS majors will be able to pull out a good game on this project. With that being said, while this final project sounds cool in theory it is actually pretty stressful when you can't really easily learn the game engines. Also, I had taken Dracula before and expected the amount of writing to be the same, if not less, but actually found out this class has a bit more writing (out of class prompts & 3 essays) and I kind of felt overloaded with all the writings which were due within like 2 weeks from each other (it was okay though because you could submit 5 day extensions). Though, there is less reading than Dracula.

This course was fun! I recommend it if you are a BACS major needing an interesting integration elective.

The main work of the course was divided up among 3 writing assignments (which were somewhat long—three pages single spaced) and a final project which involved making your own video game using one of 4 game engines.

Lectures were fun (though some of them felt a bit more fun than educational, which I guess is not necessarily a bad thing). I did start to feel like some of the lectures almost felt like filler ones toward the end though, especially the ones that just talked about vampire games. The participation points earned through following along with the short questions in the slideshows through Top Hat (basically clicker questions) were really easy to obtain. The writing assignments were each fairly long but also interesting. The first one was a literature review on an aspect of vampirism. My only complaint is that it was somewhat difficult to find academic sources for that one, but it ended up being neat to write about once I found some. Google Scholar, JSTOR, and the UVA library resources are your friend if they keep that assignment. The other two writing assignments were critical analyses of two games. My advice is to pick a shorter game than I did, since I spent many hours playing to have enough to write about, which, while fun, also took up a great deal of time. But this was also a pretty cool experience. If you like writing like me, you'll enjoy these assignments (though I do think they could be slightly shorter, but I did not mind too much). They also graded these pretty generously like most stuff in the class. It is meant to be a fun experience.

By far the best part of the class was making a game though. If you are a CS major with an interest in game development, this is definitely for you. It was super cool to see it all come together, and I had a great time. Definitely push yourself and try to make the game in Godot if you think you'll have the time. (Also picking a good group is important!) The lectures around game development focused mostly on the abstract parts and the process of designing and developing, which was useful. Actually learning the engines was left as an independent exercise, which I think was valuable, though a bit more time on the engines in lecture might have been helpful. But, there were also office hours for that, so I think it worked out.

All in all, this was a fairly easy and fun course (but be prepared to spend a lot of time on the final project and some of the writing). If you like vampires, video games, and game development, I can't recommend it enough! And both professors were really nice and clearly passionate. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!