Spreadsheets for Game Designers

Catalog description

All too easy to overlook, humble spreadsheet software can be a surprisingly versatile and valuable tool for any game designer’s toolkit. This hands-on practicum for game designers and digital artists will explore spreadsheet software as a creative tool, exploring novel applications as well as professional examples from games and digital art. Students will learn how to use spreadsheets in an array of applications: As a prototyping environment, as computational graph paper, as databases for narrative scripting, as a procedural text generator, as a map making tool and for pixel art, for storing information for other software environments, for systems modeling, gameplay analysis, and more. The course will culminate in making games and creative works using spreadsheets as the development environment. Spreadsheets are ubiquitous in game design, and proficiency with using them is frequently listed as a job requirement for design-oriented roles. However, most introductory materials for spreadsheets center on traditional accounting and finance applications, use-cases that far removed from how designers use them (and far outside the interests of many artists). This course is designed to address that by focusing on spreadsheets in a variety of forms (Excel, Google Sheets, and Open Office) as a game design tool specifically to supplement your work in all other classes.