Game Design and Development

Description

The Summer School Game Design and Development is suitable for advanced bachelor-, master-, and Ph.D. students, and focuses on:

• Hands-on game design tutorials,
• Workshops with the Unity game development environment,
• Lectures on User-centered game design, Player motivation, Storytelling, Virtual Characters, and Player types & Game patterns.

In this summer school, you will learn about methods and theories for creating effective game designs; from user-centered game design and storytelling, to applied psychology -- and will learn how to integrate these insights into your own game design!

Also, at the end of the week you can construct and critically analyze game designs by relating specific game design decisions to the intended experience of a game.

Finally, at the end of the week you can create a working prototype of a video game (!), building on user-centered game design, paper prototyping and user studies.

Registration to the summer school includes free lunches, as well as a free social event for the participants of this summer schools. Additional social events exist too -- such as night canoeing, bowling, and a pub quiz -- for which you can register.

It is important that participants in this course have an affinity with games and game design. Programming skills are useful but are not required for this summer school.

Day to Day Documents

Summer School 2026 – Game Design and Development.pdf

Lecturers

Two assistant professors from Utrecht University will provide lectures and workshops for this summer school, i.e., Dr. Sander Bakkes and Dr. Julian Frommel. Their expertise is on game design, human-computer interaction, game programming, game artificial intelligence, persuasive technologies, user-experience modelling, and gamification.

In addition, student assistants from Utrecht University will be involved in providing support and assistance for the hands-on sessions.

Target audience

The summer school is suitable for advanced bachelor-, master-, Ph.D. candidates and post-docs. High school students are generally not encouraged to apply.

A good command of the English language is important, as well as good social skills. Programming skills are not strictly necessary, as we will be offering a workshop in the 'Unity' game development environment. It is advised however to give the Unity tutorials a try before starting the summer school.

Aim of the course

The aim of the course is to provide you with experience and an understanding of important aspects in the design and development of games. You will obtain hands-on experience in designing and developing games.

Study load

There are about eight contact hours per day. These include lectures, workshops, demo's and discussion.

Tags

• game design
• psychology
• game development
• storytelling