UConn Pre-College Summer: VR and Video Game Design

Come Game Jam with us and make your ideas come to life, and share with your friends! UConn's Pre-College Summer VR and Video Game Design course provides high school students the opportunity to dive into the world of digital media through developing games from scratch at a nationally ranked public university campus.

If you play games, chances are you've thought about creating them yourself. So come in and create a game from scratch using industry-standard tools and see if you like it! There are careers in art, programming, design, and business in the video game industry, bigger than the music, sports, or movie industry and currently seeing huge growth in sales as entertainment focuses on esports and home entertainment.

By the end of this course, you will have generated a portfolio piece for your future college applications and get feedback on your search. If you have a portfolio already, awesome! if you're just getting started and are thinking "OMG where do I even start?" that's ok, we can help get you on the right approach. Whether it's finding opportunities at video game companies that are looking for play-testers or making a series of game prototypes, let's figure it out together!

This class is meant to be immersive and students will experience:

• Do you know Flappy Bird was made in a couple of days? There are games that are beautiful, games that are fun, and games that make you want to scream. Our job is to enable you to develop your own "Work of Game" and focus on something you would want to play yourself.
• The game industry is huge! We find out what companies and career paths exist in the industry by investigating portfolios from developers of Halo, Assassins Creed, and Call of Duty. We also take a look at portfolios from students graduating with a 4-year degree, so that you can find a benchmark for "what you'll need to be able to learn"
• You can't make something if you don't understand it! Part of a Game Designer's job is to examine games critically, so we will play some short web games and analyze their content.