One of the most exciting aspects of my department's new Game Design & Development Concentration is a three-semester capstone experience. Eventually, this sequence of courses will be team taught through Computer Science, Animation, and Music, but since my department is a year ahead in the curriculum approval process, we will be having a CS-focused sequence the first time out.
The first course in the sequence is CS390 Game Studio Preproduction, and I am teaching it for the first time this Spring. I have spent many hours prepping for this course, and this week, I am finally feeling confident in my design decisions.
As the title implies, this is the preproduction experience for the production courses, which will be a sequence of senior-level courses offered for the first time next year. The success of production hinges on good preproduction, and so there's a lot of pressure in CS390 to get things right. I decided to use Richard Lemarchand's A Playful Production Process as the primary text for the class, and we'll be reading through the book and completing exercises from it during the semester. The advice in his book is that 15% of time be spent on ideation, and mapping that to a three semester sequence means that my students will spend the first six weeks of the semester in that phase. Coming out of ideation, I expect the students to be able to form teams around ideas as they move into preproduction proper. At the end of the semester, each team will be expected to have a vertical slice (or at least a beautiful corner), a game design macro, and a production schedule.
The semester will culminate in the student teams' presentations to a Game Proposal Review Board. This board of industry professionals will give feedback to each team and have the power to approve or reject each project. The approved ones will be the ones that move forward into production next year. Students on rejected projects will be reassigned to other teams so that we can produce the highest quality outcome. I already have two board members signed up, including one alumnus, and I am waiting to hear back from one more.
Lemarchand's book gives a good intellectual framework for thinking about preproduction, but I was still left with many course design decisions. One of these decisions was how to grade the students; since I am required to give a grade, I need to make sure it is done in an appropriate manner. I have been thinking about how to get more results out of the efforts I put into grading, and this course provided an opportunity for me to think more about that. In particular, I would like a little more clarity and a little less of the reduction in implicit motivation that comes with grading. As a result, I'm taking a page from my colleague David Largent's handbook and trying a more by-the-books approach to specifications grading.
I have set up categories in which students can earn "tiers" (grades) based on their work and dedication to the class. The easy two to set up were participation and exercises, the first of which deals with classroom engagement and the latter with individual assigned work. These are all graded on an S/U basis, and satisfactory performance unlocks higher tiers. I will do something similar for the four end-of-semester outputs, but I want to be able to think more about those and also to negotiate the details with my students. For the final category, I added achievements. As in CS222, I was inspired by the idea of rewarding students for doing authentic work that excites them, but I did not use the same formal system as in that class. Instead, I set it up so that the achievements are harder and, essentially, someone either completes one or not. Then, in the final course grade, the achievement acts as a sort of buffer, allowing students to gain higher course grades. A student who does no achievements but aces the rest of the requirements will still get a well-deserved A, while a student who slips up in another category can use an achievement to still demonstrate excellence and get a well-but-differently-deserved A.
The class is actually below the usual enrollment threshold, but because it is part of a new program, the dean has approved it to go forward regardless. I know all the students who are signed up since they have all come through other courses I have taught, and so they all know that we're in for some serious business and hard fun. A couple of the students are also taking my immersive learning CS490 class, which means they are actually taking more than the normally allowed number of games-related courses since they are sitting in a transitional curriculum—good for them!
As usual, I have put my course plans publicly online, and you are welcome to read them. I am looking forward to getting to work with these students and see what they can make.
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