A Time and Cost Effective Approach to 3D Scenario Building in a Digital Game Design Class

This paper demonstrates an integration of modern technologies to provide an effective approach that can help teachers and students focus on creative design rather than on complex graphic tools or commercial game engines in a capstone class. Ignoring the unnecessary functions of expensive commercial packages, we develop and implement our own solution package that includes Google SketchUp, 3D Warehouse and Microsoft Virtual Worlds technology to teach gaming context and content design with 3D scenario building. The empirical experiment proved the feasibility of our work when the students were able to visualize and present their designs of digital games with less cost and fewer efforts than would be needed with the commercial software packages that are generally used to achieve this.