Game Animation BA(Hons)

You'll learn what it takes to make an animated game, including asset creation, project management and development pipelines, pitching ideas and considering theories about what games are and how they engage players. Developing your skills in animation, you'll enhance cross-disciplinary groups as you pitch a game and build it as part of a collaborative team.

Modules

Development Foundations

You’ll be introduced to the basic principles of game animation, including key roles, terminology and tools used in the development of digital products and services.  

Working as part of a small team, you’ll practice various prototyping methods and pitch your idea for a future games project.

Digital Creativity

You’ll explore a range of digital media formats, including text, image and sound. You’ll experiment with manipulating digital artefacts and learn how to integrate them with digital game technologies, such as game engines, to make your work interactive.

Game Animation 1

Through regular animation exercises, you’ll deepen your knowledge of key animation principles, including learning about rigging and animation workflows. You’ll then produce a showreel of your work.

Reading Games

To help inform and broaden your own development practice, you’ll study and write about the nature of digital experiences, their markets and the context of their production.

Multidisciplinary Teamwork

Working in multi-skilled teams, you’ll produce a digital product or service in response to a brief. You’ll learn how to manage a software development project and apply your specialist skills in game animation within a development pipeline.

Game Animation 2

Building from the Game Animation 1 module, you will focus entirely on creating believable characters, developing a full motion set for a character that will be set up in a game engine ready for playing.

With greater confidence in your skills, you'll mirror professional game development as you tackle a larger game project in a multi-skilled group. Over the course of the year, you'll research and experiment with various approaches to game animation and create innovative features. You'll investigate strategies to enhance the player experience and learn what drives industry trends and developments from visiting professionals. Throughout the year you'll continue developing your specialist game animation practice.

Modules

Game Form and Player Experience

In this module, you’ll explore the relationship between game design and player experience. You’ll research theories of game play, and analyse the popularity of certain methodologies, including ludic experiences and narrative.

World Building: Pre-production

Working in a multi-skilled team, you’ll design a concept for a digital ‘world creation’ project. You’ll broaden your understanding of key game animation principles, including world-building and exploratory concept work, prototyping, pre-production, and the early phases of production.

Game Animation 3

You'll develop advanced rigging and animation skills, with an emphasis on facial rigging and motion capture. You’ll also create a short cinematic sequence to highlight a game character.

World Building: Production

You’ll continue to design and build your ‘world creation’ project while working in your multi-skilled teams. You’ll deliver content in line with production milestones and prepare to launch and market your product.

Collaboration

You’ll collaborate with fellow students in the Games Academy to respond to a challenge brief.

You’ll then use this experience to respond to a second project brief set by the Game Animation course teams.

During the final year of your Game Animation course, you'll produce a complete and potentially publishable game as part of a team. By pitching it to industry professionals, you'll receive reliable and insightful feedback. You'll also research a topic relevant to your project and build an online portfolio with a clear centrepiece, sharpening your real-world insights and building valuable career contacts.

Modules

Experience Design

Broadening your transferable skills, you’ll create a product or service centred around experience design. This could include an animated short film, interactive novel, animation for an app, motion capture sequence or animated assets for a specific media experience.

Future Skills

Focusing on employability, you’ll develop a commercial awareness and entrepreneurial mindset. You’ll explore career options, including researching the skills required to set up your own business, establish yourself as a freelancer, or for use as an employee in a business or organisation.

Professional Portfolio

You’ll broaden your knowledge of employment and enterprise opportunities within the industry, and receive mentoring on how to apply for work, including CV and portfolio advice.

Future of Games

You'll explore the current climate of contemporary games and digital culture, while examining cultural and technological changes that are likely to influence the future of the games industry. In doing this, you’ll confront a range of issues relating to ethical production and sustainability, equality and civil rights, and personal identity and ideology.

Major Collaboration

Leveraging the skills learnt across the three years, you'll deliver a substantial collaborative project. Working in multi-skilled teams, you’ll design and build a digital product or service, such as a mobile app, installation, game, web application, robot, immersive experience or software development tool.

Why study an Integrated Foundation Year route?

If you’re taking on a new subject that you haven’t studied in depth before, have been out of education for a while or have a non-standard educational background then an Integrated Foundation Year degree may be the right choice for you. It is a four-year degree with an Integrated Foundation Year to start, which allows you to explore the primary elements of your subject before progressing on to the remaining three years of the BA(Hons) degree.

What you'll learn

If you choose this pathway, you'll study five core modules in your Foundation year. These are all designed to help you explore the foundational elements of your subject. You'll gain relevant technical skills, learn to experiment and take risks, develop an understanding of professional practice, have opportunities to work across disciplines and collaborate with other students on live project briefs.

Modules

Explore

You'll begin your foundation year by working collaboratively with others to explore themes of the future. You'll take risks, experiment through play and be supported to break through barriers.

Technique

You'll take subject-specific workshops and develop essential technical and practical skills in your area of study. You'll also enhance your analytical and organisational abilities.

Apply

You'll work with your peer group to think beyond discipline by addressing a societal or global issue. You'll then showcase your work to your peers and deliver and accompanying evaluation of your process.

Industry

You'll enhance your creative and practical skills in your subject specialism by responding to typical industry briefs, underpinned by focused research and experiments. You'll also gain industry insights through guest lectures and workshops.

Launch

You'll develop your unique identity in your specialism through the production of a self-initiated body of work. Your final project will be the bridge to your next year, fully supported by evaluative reviews and critical analysis of the work you have created.

After the Foundation year, you progress into Year One of the full three-year degree, equipped with a deeper knowledge of your subject, a clear understanding of your strengths, and develop a practical and technical skillset and the confidence to excel in your chosen subject.