Notes from the Inaugural Game Preproduction Class: Commencing with a More Aggressive Schedule (and something about 4 C's)

One of my tasks for the day was to take my digital notes for CS390 and turn these into activities for the students to do. Up to this point, I had a reading schedule in mind, but my notes about the kinds of activities I might ask students to do outside or inside class were unrefined. I began working on it this morning, but very quickly I came across something troubling in the schedule: my original plan had us reading portions of the textbook and doing supporting exercises up through the end of March, which only left less than a month of dedicated time for teams to pull together a vertical slice, a game design macro, and a schedule. Yikes.

I took this to class today, and we spent half of the day discussing plans for the future. I suggested that we could keep to the original plan, giving the benefit of building a deep understanding of the ideas in the reading while also having the drawback of less time for hands-on work. I proposed that we could flip this around, cramming about 120 pages of reading into very little time, basically just getting used to where things are in the book, and then devote ourselves to our immediate design problems. I also suggested a middle path. That is the way most of the students wanted to go, and so that's what I just updated on the course plan.

The timing of this turned out to be in our favor. The readings naturally clump into themes that correspond to the three deliverables. Hence, our next three meetings will involved focused discussion on the vertical slice, the game design macro, and the schedule, respectively. 

Looking back, I wonder if we could have followed a more aggressive reading schedule from the beginning. I enjoyed a leisurely pace through some of the chapters and the opportunity to explore things like automatic writing, brainstorming, and mind mapping with my students. Some of these were more useful than others, however, and I've already written about how these things didn't help us converge during the ideation phase. Next time I teach the course, I will have to give this careful consideration.

The expectation that I had for the students today was that each team explore what Lemarchand calls the Four C's: Core loop, Character, Camera, and Control. Honestly, I thought this would be a slow pitch for the student teams, but when we got into the discussion, I wished we had the whole 75 minutes for it. Having to express these four concepts got each of the teams to have important discussions, some of which were clearly not quite resolved at the time of the presentations. There wasn't direct disagreement, but there was definitely uncertainty. Also, there were a lot of good comments from the other team members (and me) about some of the decisions and the way they were articulated. I had a hard time expressing to the student when I was giving recommendations about process and when I was giving advice about design, which makes me wonder if I ought to be distinguishing those more clearly. Maybe I'll ask the students what they think about that.