Game Design at UNC with Industry Skilled Evie Wang

Evie (Yanting) Wang, assistant professor of Game Design within the School of Art and Design, is a 3D/2D artwork generalist, recreation designer and filmmaker. She at the moment teaches courses in Game Design, Advanced Image Making and Emerging Technologies from a starting to a complicated degree. Wang’s focus is on giving college students actual abilities that she is aware of they may want within the aggressive job market. There are not any conditions to take Introduction to Game Design, and upper-level recreation design programs settle for conditions in English and Journalism, which opens this trajectory to a variety of UNC college students. Wang goals to foster a tradition of collaboration, curiosity and significant pondering in her courses of scholars with various pursuits. 

 In late October, recreation design college students had been designing and testing unique board video games earlier than committing their ideas to digital variations. They had been frank with one another about what doesn’t work within the prototypes—what isn’t balanced, isn’t honest, takes too lengthy and distracts gamers from the goal. After this era of workshopping, they’ve higher merchandise. This is the primary a part of Wang’s course of for college kids; they transfer from finding out recreation idea, gameplay and participant mindset to studying to make use of software program platforms like Blender, Substance Painter and Unity. 

She encourages college students to construct their portfolios and have them prepared for potential employers, whether or not within the gaming business or not. Game design abilities like high quality assurance, graphic design, 3D modelling, idea artwork making, primary programming and promotion are extremely transferable to other forms of associated careers, together with UI/UX programming, high quality assurance testing and 3D printing.  

Wang can be exposing college students to the gaming business by means of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), numerous “game-jam” occasions and “game expo days.” These give college students alternatives to showcase their tasks to specialists. She usually brings in visitor audio system to encourage college students and advise on tasks.  

As a gaming skilled herself, Wang is well-connected within the business. She taught courses throughout and after her Master of Fine Arts diploma at New York University. She’s at the moment engaged on the staff that created Skadi Tower, a free recreation for telephones/tablets, and as an artwork director for Camdown, a streaming simulator that has caught the eye of the key recreation developer of the sport Peak. Wang has additionally labored with the New York Natural History Museum and NYU Create Lab, the place she designed studying video games for medical college students.  

As the Game Design program at UNC grows, Wang and Samuel Dong Saul, assistant professor of Integrated Media Arts and Graphic Design, are coordinating plans with Ludek Drizhal in Music Composition and Socrates Garcia in Music Technology to discover movie and recreation music collaborations. They’re additionally eager about working with Theatre, Computer Science, Educational Technology and Business college students sooner or later.