Game Design Using Computer Games To Promote Thinking Skills: Fill & Download for Free

Some suggestions that immediately spring to mind are:Take regular physical exercise: This will improve bloodflow and oxygenation in the brain, and good general health promotes good mental health. (I can highly recommend Tai Chi for people of all ages and physical abilities. Many people also recommend yoga for similar reasons.)Make sure you get enough sleep: Numerous studies have shown that lack of sleep can impair mental function in the areas of alertness, attention span, concentration, short-term and long-term memory, problem-solving, reaction time, visual and auditory acuity, and so on - i.e. pretty-much every area of mental function! Sleep - and especially the right mixture of deep and REM sleep - is vital for maintaining good mental health. (Note that both physical exercise (see above) and meditation (see below) can promote healthy, regular sleep patterns.)Eat a healthy, balanced diet rich in 'brain foods': Your brain needs certain essential nutrients to perform at an optimum level, particularly with regard to neurotransmitter-precursors, electrolytes (i.e. salts) and fuel (primarily glucose). By eating a healthy, balanced diet rich in fruits, grains, vegetables and proteins (especially from animal protein, e.g. chicken, dairy products and fish), you will ensure that your body is getting the right amounts of vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, amino acids and micro-nutrients and can maintain healthy brain function without having to buy expensive dietary supplements (some of which work, but many of which don't).If you are a smoker, STOP!: The various toxins in cigarette smoke can impair brain function in various ways, and have been linked to long-term cognitive decline.Moderate your alcohol intake: Drinking alcohol in moderation, especially when combined with socializing, can be beneficial for brain function in various ways. But excessive alcohol consumption can impair brain function, both acutely and chronically, and may, in extreme circumstances, cause permanent cognitive impairment.Learn meditation, e.g. Mindfulness: Meditation has numerous proven beneficial effects on brain function, such as improved concentration, attention span, creativity and alertness.Try smart drugs, i.e. nootropics (if you can obtain them legally, of course) : There is some evidence - some clinical, some merely anecdotal - that these can boost mental function in the areas of concentration, alertness, memory, mental stamina and so on. (Unfortunately, nootropics can be quite expensive and difficult to obtain in some countires.)Regularly expose your brain to novel learning challenges, e.g. learning a new language, musical instrument, area of mathematics, etc.: This will promote mental plasticity and versatility. (And I genuinely believe that learning any area of mathematics, in particular, will probably boost your IQ by a few points; mathematics is an excellent mental workout, as it exercises logical, numerical, visual, creative problem-solving and other forms of abstract reasoning, as well as improving concentration and mental stamina.)Join a general knowledge quiz team: This will improve the brain's ability for rapid recall of frequently random, unconnected and obscure pieces of information. It is also a very sociable pastime in the company of usually quite smart, interesting people (see below).Cultivate friendships with intelligent, educated people, and make a point of meeting up with them regularly for stimulating conversation on a diverse range of subjects: Through challenging intellectual discussion with intelligent people you will be exposed to novel ideas and fresh perspectives, and will learn the ways in which intelligent people think and express themselves, and these will often rub off on you.Watch a diverse range of educational TV programmes, i.e. documentaries, factual films and current affairs programmes, and be more discriminating in your viewing generally: This will improve your general knowledge and expand your conversational repertoire (and thereby your social confidence), and you may discover new interests. (An excellent online source of documentaries on numerous subjects is www.topdocumentaryfilms.com)Read at least one 'serious' book per week, and diversify your reading: This will improve your vocabulary and verbal intelligence, and increase your general knowledge and conversational repertoire. You can also boost your verbal intelligence with various free online language resources, such as Find out how strong your vocabulary is and learn new words at Vocabulary.com. (which I do recommend).Play a mentally challenging computer game: First-person shoot-em-ups and racing games are fine for honing your reaction time and exercising your trigger finger, but don't offer much in the way of mental stimulation. So instead, choose a game that involves learning complex rules and strategies, and demands a variety of mental skills. (I might be biased, but I think the game I play beats all others hands-down in this respect - EVE. It is quite simply the deepest, most complex and sophisticated computer game ever developed (and it runs on the most powerful gaming supercomputer on the internet, called Tranquility), as well as being visually breath-taking. 'A game designed by geniuses for geniuses', as a friend once described it. Go to the EVE Online YouTube channel and watch some of the videos (some produced by players) EVE Online and you'll see what I mean :o) ). Or read this article about the unique appeal and intellectual demands of the game: Why is EVE Still a Thing? And then, if it looks intriguing, download the client, create an account, and start playing. EVE is now free-to-play up to a certain level, so you can ‘try-before-you-buy’. Should you then decide that you want to experience all the game has to offer, upgrading to a full account is very inexpensive - currently less than 10 GBP per month for UK players.Use brain-training software that has demonstrated some improvements in working memory and fluid intelligence: Most brain-training computer games do not produce the cognitive benefits that they claim, because they generally only train you to become better at playing that particular game; the improvements are not transferable to other types of brain-training games or translatable into improvements in general cognitive abilities. However, one brain-training game that has demonstrated measurable improvements in general cognitive abilities, specifically in the areas of working memory and fluid intelligence, is Dual N-Back. Even better, the game is free to download and use. Article: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/smart_software, software: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/Challenge self-limiting beliefs about your intelligence: Many smart people are smarter than they think they are [1], but they have never realized their true potential because of self-limiting beliefs about their supposed lack of intelligence, often implanted in them by overly demanding parents or overly critical (and often incompetent) school teachers. By a process of systematically questioning the factual basis of these beliefs, and coming to the realization that they are actually groundless, they can let go of them, and finally unleash their true potential. I know a girl who had such self-limiting beliefs, and worked as a humble office secretary, until one day she took the Mensa IQ test, and passed it. She now has a PhD in astrophysics, a rewarding career, and has never been happier. And the moral of that story is simple - dare to believe in yourself!:o)[1] This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where people of lower than average intelligence tend to over-estimate their intelligence, whereas people of higher than average intelligence tend to under-estimate their intelligence. Dunning–Kruger effect

The glib answer is: make it yourself.Because that isn't particularly helpful, let me expand on this a bit, and try to add something constructive. First, however, an important reality check: Game studios are filled with people who have game ideas to pitch, and folks in the games industry are continuously getting game ideas pitched to them from would-be-game-designers. Some of these ideas are exceptional, some of them are inspired, and some of them are terrible. Most professional game designers have a file filled with great game ideas that they have pitched to their studios and had rejected. It's safe to say that you will never meet someone in the games industry with any decision making power who will say "You know what I don't have enough of? Good ideas for games for us to make!"When the industry was a young unexplored frontier it was pretty easy to go from "I have a crazy-awesome game idea" to "I made this game!" Costs to develop were low, the audience and market were naive and open to new experiences, and the tools needed to create a game were open to auto-didactic mastery by virtue of the technological limitations of the platforms of the era. Sadly, many of these things are now untrue: developing a title can cost millions of dollars, there is a saturated games market with a knowledgeable audience that has high expectations of new games, and complexifying games technology has necessitated a high degree of specialization that means that even many seasoned professionals in the industry lack the complete skill set needed to just "make a game". With the exceptionally high costs of production and the rising impact of software piracy on their bottom line, games publishers need their game to be a global hit in order to turn a profit: this is a risk-averse ecosystem, which is why publishers favor established franchises, genres, and models of play over untested new IP (intellectual property). An unfortunate consequence of this is that there are perverse incentives for new and innovative game designs, meaning that mainstream game design is becoming more and more templatized.All is not lost, however! As an aspiring game designer, you do not need to wait for a gatekeeper in the games industry to develop your game. The success of many independent developers have demonstrated that it is possible to develop a game on your own (contrary to my previous statements about the complexity of today's gaming technology preventing exactly this). Going from game idea to actual game is a non-trivial process, but it can be a lot of fun, and can be very rewarding.Here is some advice that I give my students in game design classes:Don't waste your best idea on your first game: I find that many young, would-be, game designers try to start big; they want to design the next Halo, or Mass Effect, or SimCity. This is akin to a writer trying to write a 1000 page best-selling novel without first learning the basic rules of grammar, or without writing any other prose. Likewise, you might have a great idea for a dimension spanning massively multiplayer musical cheese trading simulation game, but if you don't understand basic principles of game design (such as reinforcement and reward structures; mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics; game economies; drama; narrative arcs; etc.) you are going to have a hard time realizing this dream. Given that game design requires such a significant investment of time and effort, even when trying to go-it-alone, wearing yourself out in pursuit of a big idea that you are not ready to do justice to isn't a great plan. It is worth it to try a few smaller, lower commitment, projects first; build your skills, make your mistakes on something that you do not feel precious about and learn how to best execute your big idea. If you only have the one game idea, this might be a time to consider how important it is to you to see the game made.Don't get hung up on digital games: I love computer games so much that I'm getting a PhD in them. That said, my first game designs were for board games, card games, and pen & paper RPGs. While there are many resources for making your own digital games (I'll discuss some of them below) they all require that you learn a tool. More importantly, they place that tool between you and the experience of your game idea. Until you master that tool, your game will only be as good as your ability to make the tool work. In contrast, designing a board game or a card game, or an RPG (or a dice game, or a playground game, or a party game, or a trivia game...) requires only a pen, paper, and perhaps some game tokens and dice. Making a playable non-digital version of your game also forces your to work out the game mechanics in explicit detail, so even if a game is destined for a digital future, it is worth investing some time in the realm of rules and paper. This leads to my next piece of advice:PROTOTYPE! ITERATE! and TEST!: I cannot make these three words big enough or bold enough! There are not enough exclamation points to communicate how important these three practices are to a game designer. The biggest mistake my students make (and they make it no matter how desperately I entreat them otherwise) is to mistake a game design document for a game. A game design - even a very well realized one with rules, and tokens, and paraphernalia and whatever else is needed to play - isn't really a game: a game is the experience that happens when players put these systems into action through play. (To be fair, this isn't a great academic definition of a game, but for the purposes of learning game design, it is a very important way to think about things.) Until a game is played you don't really know anything about it. You can write and rewrite the rules, you can speculate on how the dynamics will play out, you can create art and code and music but none of it make what you've made a game until people play it. From the first moment you start working on a game idea, you should be putting it in practice: paper prototypes, proof of concept demos, low-fi visualizations, these are the tools of early game design! Make something playable as early as possible in the design process, and get other people to play it! (don't playtest in a vacuum, and pay close attention to what your playtesters say and do: Where are they confused? Where are they frustrated? Where are they having fun? Which rules do you have to explain multiple times?) Accept that it will take multiple iterations of a design to "find the fun", and commit to letting go of the ideas that don't work in practice, even if you really think they should. This advice is just as true for digital games as for non-digital games: start with a paper prototype of your game idea, test it, iterate, test again, and then build a low fidelity version of the game engine in whatever platform (see below) you are fastest in, and test and iterate again. Don't get hung up on making it perfect or complete before testing: break it into smaller more easily created parts, make those, and test them in isolation before putting them together.Find good collaborators: Just because you don't have a studio backing you, doesn't mean you need to learn to do everything yourself. The internet is full of talented people with remarkable capabilities, many of whom are also looking for someone to support their project. The game mod community is a treasure trove of talent: it's filled with artists, modelers, riggers, animators, composers, programmers, writers, and designers trying to develop their skills either for fun, or as a way of preparing to enter the industry some day. Finding other people to work with will likely force you to transform and evolve your vision in order to complete your game, but this is true whether or not you are working with close friends, or strangers on the internet, or with a studio whose output is dictated by a publisher. If you are unwilling to compromise any aspect of your design, you will need to get used to doing everything yourself, or perhaps reconsider if this is the right field for you.Take advantage of existing game design knowledge: One of the few edges we have over the pioneers of the medium is that we now know much more about the dynamics of games, play, and fun than we ever have in the past. There are many great resources out there for aspiring designers. Read Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's book Rules of Play. It is awesome. Read Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop. Read Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design. Read Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. If you aren't feeling up to buying and reading books about this, there are plenty of online resources as well. At the very least, familiarize yourself with the principles of MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) and Marc LeBlank's 8 Kinds of Fun! (http://8kindsoffun.com/) I require all of my students (and family members and friends, actually) to know how MDA works.Explore the many wonderful tools out there: It used to be that to make a game you needed to create everything from scratch. Now, if you can imagine the game, there is probably some sort of middleware or platform out there to help you build it. For every tool, there is a thriving community of people trying to make games that can help you learn the ropes. Here is a partial list:Unity (http://unity3d.com/): A very popular (and powerful) multi-platform development tool.The Unreal Engine (http://www.unrealengine.com/): Another extremely powerful game engine, used for many commercial games including Mass Effect.Inform (http://inform7.com/): The flagship application for authoring interactive fiction. Very very powerful tool, with a small but obsessive community of users behind it. It really is designed for one thing, but it does that thing very well.Processing (http://processing.org/): A great platform for leaning the basics of coding, and doing quick dirty prototypes. Very fast learning curve, and very powerful for simple things.Adobe Flash/FLEX (http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder-family.html): Flash and Action Script are among the default tools we teach undergrads in our digital media program when introducing them to principles of interactivity and game design. Although not cheap, and no longer simple or easy to learn, Flash is still a staple platform in many respects (I am not a huge fan, but it has an established community of developers and who am I to argue with them).Microsoft XNA (semi-retired)(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb200104.aspx): XNA was a great(?) development environment for designers to publish games to the Xbox live arcade (and to PCs as well) but it looks like it didn't really catch on: Windows 8 will only partially support XNA applications, and the platform is not without it's detractors. (See here for some more info: http://thriftynerd.com/2011/09/no-xna-in-windows-8/). The failure of XNA might be tied to the failure of the XBox Live Arcade Indie Channel which was supposed to be the place for indie devs to promote their XBox games, but instead just became a ghost town.Yo Yo Game Maker (http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/windows/): I've occasionally had students submit projects made in this engine with decent results: It's targeted at causal and browser based games, but it makes a good prototyping tool if nothing else.RPG Maker (http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/): RPG Maker has been around for quite some time: it is a surprisingly powerful engine for making JRPG style games, with many free visual and audio assets. As with Inform, it really only does one thing, but it does that one thing very very well.Many more: Not listed here are the multitudes of editors, construction kits, and engines that come with many commercial games. Bioware and Bethesda are both great about releasing construction kits for their games, as are Blizzard and Valve. Portal started its life as a Half Life 2 mod. If your game resembles an existing property, it might make sense to try and create a mod in a similar engine first.There is more to learn if you want to make your own game, but hopefully this will get you thinking about some of the possibilities open to you: selling your idea to a studio isn't the only way to get a game made, which is a good thing because if it were no one would ever do it.

UPES is definitely one of the best institutes when it comes to education in the domains of engineering and computer science. In addition to a beautiful campus, there are several other reasons that make it a university of choice.There is a wide range of diverse factors to consider and evaluate before classifying an institute as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is impossible to judge the standing and value of an educational institute on just one factor. As per my vast experience and understanding of UPES as an institute, if you are focused and dedicated enough, completing a B.Tech degree could help you a long way. Here are the reasons why I think so :Modern & Relevant EducationI’ll take up the example of the Computer Science undergraduate course to show how the institute has done extremely well to capture trends in the current market and ensure students are well-prepared for the industry today. Many institutes have courses that are outdated and simply do not fit in the industry today.You just need to look at the specialisations offered by UPES to understand this point further. Courses focused on topics such as Blockchain Technology, IT Infrastructure, AI & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Analytics, E-Commerce, IoT & Smart Cities, Mobile App Development, amongst others are proposed in collaboration with IBM. Similarly, courses like Big Data and Dev Ops are taught in collaboration with Xebia. Appropriate education along with influential academic collaborations with industry leaders such as IBM and Xebia would surely set strong building blocks for the future.Placement ProspectsUPES has a strong record when it comes to placements and attracting the best recruiters possible. I’m sure you would agree with me - when choosing a college, employment prospects is an extremely important metric to consider. For example, in the case of the School of Engineering, more than 700 students were placed last year at a success rate of 90%, at well-established companies like Ashok Leyland, Ambuja Cement, Exon Mobile, Hyundai, and ONGC. Even in the case of the School of Business, top recruiters included Dell, ITC, Nestle, and Oyo. It is quite clear you will not be too disappointed in terms of placements irrespective of which domain you choose to enter. At the end of the day, the skills of the student are what matters for him/her to get the desired placement.Campus Life & InfrastructureDue to the diverse range of subjects and courses, UPES is home to an enormous number of students. This has helped encourage a vibrant and engaging campus life. A design student has a lot to learn from an engineer, or say a lawyer. There is a sports ground which facilitates participation in many sports such as football, cricket, and volleyball. The labs for technical engineering courses are also above average and quite impressive. According to me, the most impressive part of the infrastructure and campus is the hostel. The hostel facilities are quite good when compared to other residential institutes in the country. You needn’t worry about comfort or living facilities here at UPES.ScholarshipsWhile the fee is on the higher side, the institute compensates for this by offering financial aid to deserving students in the form of scholarships. The institute has also announced an exclusive scholarship plan to promote female education. This is a 25% scholarship plan which will be applicable throughout the duration of the programme. Apart from the female scholarship, UPES offers financial aid for the BTech, BBA, LLB, and MBA programmes. I suggest you explore their website for more details.Extracurricular & Cultural ActivitiesThe organising committees and student bodies of the institute regularly organise sporting events to keep students occupied throughout the year. The students also are offered the chance to participate in inter-state and national level games besides participating in activities and games being held within the campus. The University focuses on the all-round character development of students. Cultural activities are a vital part of personality development. UPES under the aegis of Student Engagement and Experience every year organizes a fresher party and the Annual Cultural Festival – Uurja, which gives a platform to students to showcase their talents.Student AchievementsIn terms of placements, 3 students - Abhishekh Pahariya, Kartik Singh, Kamal Dua were placed at Amazon with a 30L per annum package. This just shows that if you are willing and able, you can definitely succeed at UPES, as opposed to what others have stated on this thread. In terms of international placements, a BTech student was placed in the Netherlands with a 44L per annum package.Additionally, Lakshya Gupta and Jaldeep Giniya, UPES School of Engineering students, won the Safety Impact Film Award 2019 by designing a Sleep Detector Device that helps in reducing road accidents by detecting the attention levels of the driver. They have also started a company called ‘Umbeo Tech’ which aims to solve real-life problems using technologies like Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence etc.So, in terms of engineering, UPES would definitely be my top suggestion for you - it is one of the leading institutes in this field. The institute has also done well to explore other domains such as management, design, and law as well.