DMS 462/562: Game Design

Project 4

Due Tuesday, December 11, noon ("final exam")

Goal: Teams will go through the complete process of designing a game. Major steps of the process include physical prototyping, formal play-testing, balancing, creating design documents, and organizing the team. You will create a plan for a full game, and either implement the final game or a meaningful subset of it. The game may be of any style or genre. It may be designed for any target audience, but remember that in most cases your play-testers will be college students. The game should be multi-player. Projects will be developed by teams of 3 - 4 persons.

Requirements

The following stages during the semester are required for all projects:

• a public project website
  • can be UB webspace, Wordpress, Wix, Github, whatever
  • must have information that would be meaningful to people not on your team, describing your project
  • must be updated regularly (at least once a week)
• weekly prototypes / tests, including
  • at least one physical prototype of a digital element, if the game is digital
  • at least one digital prototype (ie use a prototyping tool that is not part of the final version of the game), even if the final game is analog
  • a formal in-class playtesting session with players recruited from outside the class
• documents:
  • a focus statement (1 paragraph, as in the Rouse handout)
  • a design document, developed over the course of the project (not put together afterwards)
  • developers' logs - each team member must keep their own log
• text research:
  • as with project 3, do in-depth research on the subject of your game, and keep a bibliography, with notes, of the sources you read; include it in your design document
  • you are encouraged to read game development sources as well (books/papers/websites on design, programming, art, etc); include these in your bibliography
  • in either the bibliography or your developer logs, note who read what - every team member is required to do some reading
• game research:
  • look for, play, and evaluate other games that relate to your project (at least 4)
  • for each game, write a brief summary identifying the major formal elements from chapter 3 of the text (players, objectives, resources, etc) and any significant points from chapters 4 & 5 (economies, narrative structure, etc); also write up your general observations - anything you learn from the game that's relevant
  • include the notes in your design documentation
• digital tools:
  • use at least 2 digital tools that you (as a team) are not already familiar with
  • at least one must be related to project management or design; one can (but does not have to) be part of the final game itself
  • some suggestions, to give you ideas:
    • game technologies: 3D printing, makey-makey, Kinect, VR headset, AppFurnace, Tweepy, Facebook Messenger API, HTML5, openshift, QR codes, projection mapping
    • project tools: asana.com, trello.com, slack.com, github.com/bitbucket.org, skype, moqups.com, surveymonkey.com (for market research), Amazon mechanical turk (for market research or who knows what)
  • you should take full advantage of digital tools you already know (such as Photoshop, Unity3D, spreadsheets), but to get the credit for this part you must find & learn new things