Computer Games (Including Foundation Year)

Our BSc Computer Games (including foundation year) is open to Home and EU students. It will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your English language and academic skills.

This four-year course includes a foundation year (Year Zero), followed by a further three years of study. During your Year Zero, you study four academic subjects relevant to your chosen course as well as a compulsory English language and academic skills module.

You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering.

This is a degree in world-making. You craft stories, characters and plot in order to build imaginary worlds that a player can journey through. Our work is driven by creativity and imagination as well as technical excellence; at Essex you master both game design and computer programming, giving you total control over the worlds you want to create.

Our course gives you the skills to design and specify complex, non-trivial games through focusing on the following areas:

• The mechanics of a game, including gameplay elements and the relationship with story

• The concepts and techniques of computer game programming

• Real and virtual worlds

• Artificial intelligence behaviours for non-player characters

• 2D and 3D graphic effects and game objects (eg weapon systems)

At the end of your course, you will be able to create the outline design specification for a computer game of your own design, and to implement a game using industry-standard techniques. Both for entertainment and for more serious purposes such as virtual reality training, computer games, gamification and games intelligences are increasingly important in today’s world.

Our School is a community of scholars leading the way in technological research and development. Today’s computer scientists are creative people who are focused and committed, yet restless and experimental. We are home to many of the world’s top scientists, and our work is driven by creativity and imagination as well as technical excellence.

Programming at Essex

Teaching someone to programme is about opening a door. In Year 1 at Essex you will study a module that introduces you to programming using Python. We assess your ability to think in a programmatic way in the very first week of term and if you require additional support, we offer classes which will boost your skills and confidence with programming.