Abstract:

As the game industry has surpassed the film and music industry in revenue and scale, the requirements for working in it have also grown with companies demanding extensive work portfolios. It is observed that undergraduate students have trouble getting started in developing their ideas, setting up game project portfolios, and getting used to the idea that development goes through multiple stages like ideation, development, testing, and documentation. This paper presents the initial observations after running a new Unity game development course structured around the idea of a budgeted single developer experience. This is represented by limiting the scope, development time, and expectations while keeping the overall structure of the game life cycle as an indie developer. Each lecture module is accompanied by an exercise represented as a “but worse” version of a particularly famous part of a widely known game from different genres – Pikmin, Stellaris, Alan Wake, Doom, Fortnite, etc. The students are given both in-class and home time between lectures to work on the assignments and encouraged to think about a topic for their final project, based on the same ideas.

Each student needs to work on their final project separately and students are encouraged to share ideas and play test each other’s games. This way an environment, closer to a game development incubator can be achieved, with each student playing the role of an independent developer, having to design and build all aspects of their game. Keeping with the idea that the final product will be a worse version of the inspiration, but the development experience they get will be the important part. Three requirements are given to mimic the development of vertical game slices for idea pitches and demonstrations. First, a playable prototype uploaded to Github, with a readme explaining the project idea, structure, and how to run it. Second, a report giving a deeper overview of the code-base structure, levels, and game progression, as well as self-reported time scheduling. Finally, a presentation of the project, which should mimic an idea pitching session, with a 5-minute format.

The course took 2.5 months and 23 students were present. The developed projects are all based on widely known games and separated into genres like shooters, platformers, stealth games, etc. From the self-reported time scheduling, on average students have worked 20.5 hours on their final projects. From those, students have used an average of 1 hour for conceptualization of the game ideas, 2.1 hours for bug-fixing and testing the game, 1.3 hours for code documentation, and 4.1 hours for asset creation. Additional statistical data and figures will be presented in a possible paper.

The main complaints after the course were about the larger workload, the requirements of code documentation and keeping an online repository, as well as not having enough time to work on the given exercises. Students wanted an additional lecture focusing on animation and audio design, as a lot of them struggled with these. Students expressed they positive outlook on using real-world game examples as stepping stones when explaining more complicated mathematical and programming concepts. The freedom to pursue a final project based on their game interests, together with the “but worse” concept that freed them from worrying about achieving results that need to be perfect, was unanimously cited as steps in the right direction.

Keywords:

Game development, Unity, prototyping, time budgeting, course work.