Notes from Spring 2026 CS390 "Final Exam" meeting

Back in April, I mentioned that the "final exam" for my game preproduction class was primarily a discussion. Cleaning up my office, I found my voluminous notes from that meeting. The four questions I asked of the students were, in order, the following:

1. What do you think is missing from your preproduction work?
2. What is something you know now about preproduction that was unclear before?
3. What advice would you give yourself or to someone starting preproduction?
4. What questions do you have?

One of the major themes in my notes is that the students recognized, maybe only in retrospect, that they had lost sight of the players. They were building things they wanted to build but not conceptualizing the player experience. Curiously, a student pointed to the final presentation as the first time he recognized and understood the omission. One of the students made a clever suggestion: early in the semester, when experimenting with different constraints around ideation and prototyping, I should challenge the students to make something for someone else. 

Another theme was how challenging it was for them to understand and articulate design goals. After having struggled to maintain a vision and a direction, they came to understand why these are necessary, and all wished they had spent more time agreeing on such goals at the start of the project.

When it comes to the second question, the students came to much better understand the role of playtesting, what it means to answer questions with prototypes, the dangers of analysis paralysis, and the importance of planning in order to understand scope. 

These are my notes about the advice that they would give to new students. I am leaving out a few that were very specific to this group or repetitive. I don't know yet if I will share these verbatim with my next cohort, but I also didn't want to lose them.

• Think of game design as gift-giving, not as tinkering
• Fast prototypes to articulate ideas are good
• Don't spend too long trying to solve a problem
• Take prototyping and playtesting seriously—don't make something just to have it
• Set deadlines, use a calendar
• Write game ideas down
• Take feedback and write it down
• Prototype instead of just thinking it will be fun
• Mess it up
• Don't be afraid to fail
• Learn your scope (explore, but know strengths) and know when to move on