Classroom Card #4474
Use of Role-play and Project-Based Learning in a 3D Game Design Course
Summary
This card describes the use of team role-play activities to simulate the experience of working in a professional, game development studio.
Course
CIS 488 meets one day a week for 3 hours over a fifteen-week semester and contains a semester-long role-play in which the students function as the employees of a struggling game company. Student teams deliver three incremental 3D game prototypes. The role-play serves as backstory to provide context for project-based activities. The activities are often small group game design studio activities or solving problems that might arise in the business of game development. Students write reflections on the weekly activities. Project teams consist of both In-person and online team members who exchange information outside of class meeting times. A gamification and badging system are introduced in this course, along with peer review and peer evaluation.
Time
Semester
Materials
The class activity worksheets and rubrics appear as an attachment folder
The project assignments and rubrics appear in an attachment folder
Access to 3D game engine such as Unreal or Unity would be desirable
Access to a version control package like GetHub would be desireable
Prerequisites
Software engineering (agile software processes) and Game Design (use of game engines)
Description
The sequence of the role-play activities is defined by the documents in the card attachment folders:. For additional personal insights see the three papers listed in the card reference list.
- Class1 – Role-play overview (week 1)
- Project1 – Game Pitch Creation (week2 )
- Class2 – Game One Page and Process Definition (week 3)
- Project2 – Game Design Document (week 5)
- Class3 – Storyboard and Elevator Pitch (week 6)
- Class4 – Contract Dispute (week 7)
- Project3 – Alpha Prototype (week 8)
- Class5 – Alpha Scrum Retrospective (week 9)
- Class6 – Security Breech (week 10)
- Project4 – Beta Prototype (week 11)
- Class7 – Sequel Definition (week 12)
- Class8 – Marketing Video Creation (week 13)
- Project7 – Game Marketing Video (week 14)
- Project6 – Gold Release Prototype (week 15)
Curiosity
- Explore a contrarian view of accepted solution
Students engage in a term long role play where they play developer/owners in failing game company. They need to create innovative game products to restart the company revenue stream. Students cannot pitch and game that merely duplicates and existing game, they are required to survey current trends in toys, technology, and fashion. Students are encouraged to look for game ideas that intersect new combinations of game genre, story, and technology if they want their game idea to be greenlit by their classmates. Students are encouraged to look for hooks (like humor or a good back story) to encourage their classmates to select their game as one of the 5 or 6 to develop. Winning game pitch authors recruit their team members at an in class job fair and must sell their game to potential team members. As part of their marketing plans, students create game trailer videos prior to release of their final game prototype. Student teams define the company software process model used by all teams participating in the roleplay (usually a variation of Scrum and Kanban).
Connections
- Assess and manage risk
Professional game developers share their experiences with the class to help them understand the potential risks associated with moving from student developers to owners of their own independent game company. Students are encouraged to discover new tools and techniques to solve the game implementation problems they encounter. Students use agile development and will need to work collaboratively to complete their project and will need to be persuasive to get their design ideas accepted by their team members. Student team leaders need to define and monitor their project scope so their original game can be completed in 4 months and work with their teams to devise reasonable development timelines. After the completion of each prototype all students vote to accept and continue the development of each game based on progress made. Students are encouraged to create paper prototypes throughout the semester to assess new game mechanics and new game play ideas. Students use roleplay to assess novel game AI agents.
Creating Value
- Identify unexpected opportunities to create extraordinary value
The major project for this class is the creation of a novel 3D video game that fills a void in the commercial marketplace. Students must sell their game pitch to gain support from their classmates by selling their game ideas as being innovative and potentially attractive to customers in the marketplace. Two open questions that guide student work in this course are “what makes a game attractive to new users?” and “what makes users want to replay a game more than once?”. A gamification system is used to encourage students to choose the game development tasks that most interest them and to reward students who do extra work. Student teams present the final games at a 3D Game launch event which is attended by game professionals, program alumni, students from other colleges, and family members who play the games.
- Persist through and learn from failure
A term long roleplay (students and employees in a struggling game company) provides the context for creating a novel game in a brief time with a limited budget. Class activities involve the use of case studies dealing with development issues (open ended questions), creation of paper prototypes, developing marketing strategies, reflecting on game quality issues, and providing feedback on work products produced by other teams. Students are not familiar with the Unreal game engine when that pitching their game ideas and will need to calculate the risks involved with pitching an idea which is too ambitious for the time and project resources will have access to. Students are presented with several case study problems to solve creatively (for example intellectual property disputes, industrial espionage, security breaches). Each of these problems could halt development.
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