CS 4730

Floryan is super passionate and knows a lot about video games so that made lecture really engaging and fun (until we went online, but was still good regardless).

We worked in a group of 9 (three separate teams: engine, level, and design) and we each had different assignments (but our assignments were cumulative across all nine people so if you had bad group members then your grade could potentially suffer).

The TAs were super nice and understanding and toward the end of the semester really just wanted us to pass lol. Making games and learning about game engines was really cool!

The class has since been restructured for Fall 2020 and is taught with Unity! Would totally recommend this course to anyone who likes video games and wants some experience coding in Unity!

The course got restructured this past semester so the professor and students were under the understanding that this course may have had problems in the structure of it.
First of all, let's start with the positives, I liked and enjoyed this course. It was hard and stressful, but fun and rewarding. Lectures were interesting and fun (although online lectures after the online transition were not as fun as the teacher and student discussion in lecture were what made lecture fun). FYI, I am biased in the sense that I had a great team to work with.
Second, let's talk about the structure problems of the course. I am sure these following problems will get remediated when Floryan teaches the course again, but the largest problem from the group assignment structure was that you weren't really building your game til the last 4 weeks of school as you are spending the time before it building all the tools that you need in order to code your game. Subteams (there are 3: design, sfx/level, and engine) were working pretty much working independently the entire semester until the last 3-4 weeks so a lot of problems stemmed from bad communication across teams about what the end product needed to look like, what was needed, etc. Another problem was that the course was frustrating due to the high expectations of the professor that led to the assignments being extremely hard. However, this is a 4000 level course, expect it to be challenging and hard. That's what it means to be in a 4000 level.
If you are taking this course under this similar course structure, my advice is to make sure to be very communicative with your team members (full team and subteam wise) and to make sure to tell the professor and TAs if you run across team problems. In my personal opinion, I think this course is worthwhile to take. Even if you are not interested in game design, the aspect of working in this type of team structure is an experience worth taking. In my personal opinion, I think that the course is not difficult in that the content is hard to wrap your mind around, but rather mostly time consuming as you have to plan, code, and expect for setbacks throughout the semester. Expect to be spending a lot of time with your teammates. You will bond over your struggles.

Tl;dr whole class was re-designed which kind of made it more interesting but also a lot harder; if you don't get great teammates...it's really going to suck for you lol. I think this would be a good course to those who are seeking to further their game development knowledge, but those who are new will struggle a bit more and will have to really step up in order to do well.

So this semester, Floryan and his TAs redesigned this whole course so it's completely different from how it was structured in the past. Now, the class is divided into teams of max 9 people, who are then divided up into 3 subteams: Design, SFX/Level, and Engine, and as the names suggest, each team is responsible for the different aspects of their game. You code in SDL2, which is this really annoying development library lol (so many times....I really just wanted to use Unity :') ). You are only responsible for assignments pertaining to your specific team, however the grading system was also re-designed in a way such that your final grade is dependent on how well your teammates do on their assignments. I understand what Floryan was trying to go for when creating this system, but honestly it felt like getting a good grade (like above a C) would've been impossible (especially if you can't convince your teammates to do their work) and my GPA would have been crushed if all classes had not switched to Credit/No Credit for the semester. I also think that Floryan and the TAs were definitely very lenient when grading but also this class started off as having really high expectations. The first 2 assignments were the hardest assignments in the whole class imo.
Even though, this is supposed to be a game design class, if you aren't on the Design team, you really don't get much exposure to game design other than the lectures, which were fun pre-COVID-19, but few lectures were dedicated to going over new topics in the assignments, so I think if you are on Level or Engine teams, expect to struggle a bit more, especially if you're new to game development.

I do acknowledge that I might have more complaints about this class than others because I had a particularly bad experience with my team; basically my team was already short a few people when we started and on top of that, only like a couple of people were really motivated to work on the game towards the end, so I felt like I had to step up and try to do more, but it led to me burning out. I definitely learned a lot from this class (through my pain and tears lol) especially since I really wasn't familiar with game design or game dev prior to taking it, but when I found out that I had to do a lot more than I expected, the extra work ended up stressing me out a lot. So I can't genuinely encourage this class to someone who doesn't have strong coding skills and/or some familiarity with game development. However, if you are really interested in game design or game development and are willing to work at it, I would encourage you to try! Floryan is sympathetic if you reach out to him with your problems.

The good: Floryan is a fun lecturer and a personable guy in general. He clearly loves teaching this topic, and you do get to make your own game.

The bad: Well, ok, some people might consider this a good because you learn a lot from it, but your game engine that you build is cumulative. That means if you screw up on an earlier lab, you can really pay for it with later labs. Also, lecture can kinda devolve into 2 things: People saying meaningless things to get participation points, and people saying things because they're passionate, but speaking for too long and preventing progress.

The ugly: The TAs likely don't have a grading standard they go by, and probably have little communication with Floryan. As a result, sometimes I received high scores when I shouldn't have, and sometimes people got low scores when they shouldn't have due to some small thing like files not being in the right directory.

The class is gamified, and it's awful. The site they use for it is buggy, and poorly designed and doesn't useful info until you click 2 levels down. You also don't know where your grade will stand until the very end of the semester. And, Floryan fails you automatically if you don't get a high enough score in 1 of the 3 categories, so you're essentially getting graded on your worst performances, not the average.

Overall, if you're really really into game design and feel like you need to learn about this stuff to continue your career as an aspiring game dev, take this. Otherwise, if you're just looking for an easy stress-free elective, I recommend you don't take it.

Course is a ton of fun and Floryan is great. Hours of homework per week is a bit skewed since I took this as a 4-week summer course, but I'm sure the workload isn't as bad during the Fall/Spring. The content is interesting and fun, and the professor is great. You get to make your own game from scratch and I wish I had more time to work on it. I think I'd recommend this more as a Fall/Spring course than a Summer one but nonetheless I enjoyed it a lot.