BA (Hons) Games Art and Technology

In this module you will carry out an individual investigation, utilising secondary research to investigate the lineage of your creative practice. You will directly apply ideas to your own discipline and development, selecting an area of investigation relevant to your own practice, and communicating your argument in written or via a narrated slide presentation. The concepts you explore in this module, including your positionality and identity, are themes you will encounter frequently as a creative professional.

This module will require you to utilise your acquired knowledge to plan and create, collaboratively, a piece of work that links to your practice. Collaborating with others can help you develop new and innovative ideas and can also help you develop confidence as a creative practitioner whilst practising your communication, project management, reflection and feedback skills.

This module covers the skills required to produce game environments. Students will learn to project manage, organise construction into modular elements, implement specific 3D modelling and sculpting/texture workflows, and integrate assets into a game engine. They will understand how to shape story and player experience through environmental factors and how to take skill learnt at the prop level to a more substantial piece.

This module introduces the art direction and creation of highly-detailed 3D models using software such as ZBrush or Mudbox. The models are then rigged with a digital skeleton, allowing for animation and movement in game engines like Unity or Unreal.

This module continues the exploratory work you began in Context & Culture of the Creative Industries. You will directly apply ideas to your own discipline and development, selecting an area of investigation relevant to your own practice, and communicating your argument via your medium of choice. The concepts you encounter will actively critique claims to authenticity and originality; themes you will encounter frequently throughout your career as a Creative Professional. You will debate artistic production, the motivations for it, and the problems of creative autonomy. You will investigate relevant contemporary cultural issues and theories relating to society, race, gender,technology, and the environment to develop your contextual understanding of how these relate to your own creative practice, professional values, and sense of personal agency. You will be encouraged to meet with your Personal Adviser in a 1:1 tutorial to help you reflect on the strengths and areas for development identified in your Personal and Professional Development Plan in first year, tracking your academic progress and setting new actions that will support you to achieve your best work. The research methods and study habits you develop throughout this module will prepare you for next year’s Final Project, in which you will self-direct a significant piece of academic, creative and/or professional practice.

This module offers you exposure to practical game development processes, simulating experiences you will likely encounter in professional studios. Structured around four distinct development projects, the course introduces you to a variety of briefs from different sources, including direct input from the gaming industry, competitive environments, and academic collaborations.

This module focuses on learning techniques to produce engaging and intuitive interfaces for games and innovative control methods alongside bringing those systems to life through graphic design and motion graphics.

This module covers the skills required to produce game environments. Students will learn to project manage, organise construction into modular elements, implement specific 3D modelling and sculpting/texture workflows, and integrate assets into a game engine. They will understand how to shape story and player experience through environmental factors and how to take skill learnt at the prop level to a more substantial piece.

Students will learn a robust character design process by developing a brief or concept, creating call-out sheets and working to reference images. They will produce detailed sculpts of multiple characters, drawing upon their foundational art skills to create realistic-looking people.

Students will expand on scripting techniques both using code and visual forms. They’ll explore data types and more advanced techniques to facilitate tools and gameplay.

This module introduces Materials and Shaders, Shaders are small programs that run on the graphics processing unit (GPU) of a computer, allowing for real-time rendering of objects with realistic lighting and shading effects. These effects can include reflections, refractions, and even dynamic weather patterns. Materials define the surface properties of objects, such as texture, colour, and reflectivity. They work in conjunction with shaders to create the final appearance of an object in a game world

This module will introduce participants to the concept of procedural content creation which can substantially increase the speed of production. The sessions will look at the basic concepts of proceduralism and rule-based system development with students using Houdini in conjunction with Unity or Unreal to create and design assets that will allow artists and designers to generate and populate levels. Students will also experiment with AI art generation tools.

Students will explore basic animation principles in relation to games design and games engines. Starting with simple sprite animations and progressing to building in-game animation state machines. Students will be tasked with understanding and building animation driven character controllers.

Sound design involves creating and implementing sound effects, such as footsteps, gunshots, and ambient noise, to provide a sense of realism and immersion in the game world. Music composition involves creating original scores or licensing existing tracks to fit the game’s mood and tone.

Game engines and middleware like FMOD and Wwise provide tools for integrating sound effects and music into the game, allowing for dynamic and responsive soundscapes that change in response to player actions and events in the game world

Students will explore design for various hardware platforms: this might include handhelds, mobile or console. They will examine hardware requirements, restrictions and deployment processes.

Students will use the key engines technologies they have learnt to create content for VR and AR applications exploring the design and physiological challenges.

In this module, you’ll explore the crucial initial phases of game development. Through this journey, you appreciate the importance of comprehensive planning and leverage research-driven ideation to produce compelling game ideas. As you refine your concept, you learn to pinpoint your target market and tailor your game to their preferences. You also hone your skills in pitching game concepts, choose the most suitable project management methodologies, and ensure the optimal project scope. A highlight of the course will be guiding you in crafting a vertical slice, a representation of your game’s core design and mechanics.

In this module, you will bring your game concept or game assets to life, navigating the challenges of game development while also engaging in the negotiation process to determine the assessment criteria of your project. You will deliver a project aiming for a professional level of project management and quality assurance, keeping a developer diary to record your journey.

This module serves as the final step in preparing you for a career in the games industry. It encourages critical self-evaluation of your personal learning journey and industry engagements thus far, drawing on evidence from your entire student experience. You will explore concepts and theories of personal and professional development to assess your readiness for work. You will have the opportunity to engage with specialised workshops, facilitated by industry experts and informed by our extensive industry connections, to provide valuable knowledge and help you develop the skills needed to launch your career. The culmination of this module is the creation of a portfolio or showreel that showcases your talent and effectively communicates your unique professional identity.

This module delves into the techniques used to convey narratives within game worlds, focusing on how game professionals utilize environments to tell stories. Through this study, you’ll gain an understanding of how space, objects, and level design collaborate to create narratives that can be both explicit and implicit. By the end of the course, you will have a solid grasp of how to use the environment as an effective medium for conveying story elements, enhancing player immersion, and elevating the overall gaming experience.

This module will enable you to apply the skills and knowledge that you have gained during your studies at BIMM University and produce an extended piece of work exploring your creative practice. You will generate a project idea then extend and develop this project through to completion.

Many people in the creative technology sector go on to work in freelance roles or have ambitions to set up their own businesses. This module will look at key business examples of how that works, how you can access funding and what good management of people looks like. Participants will be expected to create a high-level business plan for a future business.

This module focuses on enhancing techniques to produce engaging and intuitive interfaces for games and innovative control methods alongside bringing those systems to life through graphic design and motion graphics including VR/AR interfaces.

Students will explore more advanced animation principles in relation to games design and games engines. Using creature and human rigs students will be challenged to create live rigs for virtual production and optical capture.

Students will explore storytelling and interactivity through the lens of worldbuilding and game lore. Students will explore how traditional storytelling practice has shifted and changed through the application of player agency.