| Section | 2 |
| Instructor | Dr. Paul Gestwicki |
| Prerequisites | CS215 and CS315 |
This is the first course in a three-course capstone experience for students in the Game Design & Development Concentration. At the end of this first class, you and your teammates will pitch a game to a board of industry professionals. Projects approved by the board will be moved into production next academic year. At the end of production, they will be published for the world to see.
The catalog description for CS390 is as follows.
Explore the pre-production process of videogame development by investigating technical, artistic, feasibility, and methodological aspects. Rapidly prototype videogame ideas in order to discover practicable concepts. Form multidisciplinary teams to build a publicly showcased vertical slice.
The Computer Science Department defines the learning objectives for each of its courses. By the end of CS390, a student will be able to:
Identify and evaluate factors that contribute to the potential business success for videogames, such as choice of tools, platform, genre, and distribution method
Rapidly prototype game software concepts in order to identify good mechanisms for original games
Collaborate across disciplinary backgrounds to develop game concepts into high-fidelity prototypes or vertical slices
Develop and present a videogame production plan
The major practical outcome of this semester is the selection of game concepts to move forward from preproduction into production. To this end, there are three major deliverables that are due at the end of the semester:
We will spend the first few weeks discussing our goals and past experiences, practicing ideation techniques, and reviewing prototyping tools. We will then proceed to prototyping in order to discover the projects that merit production. By the middle of the semester, you will commit to a team to develop one of the prototypes into the aforementioned deliverables.
The expected date for the presentation to the advisory board is Friday, April 24.
The final exam will be Wednesday, April 29, noon to 2:00 P.M.
There is no way to guarantee success in creative endeavors, but a good process can mitigate risks. Hence, your grade will be based on evidence that you have followed a mature preproduction process rather than on the intrinsic merit of the outcome. Put another way, while the advisory board will make the decision about which projects move forward to production, they have no input no your course grade.
During the semester, you will be responsible for creating a variety of artifacts such as reports, posters, and presentations. These will be weighted so that each week of the semester contributes equally to your assignments grade. Our final exam will be an opportunity to tie up any loose ends and will count in this category.
Your end-of-semester deliverables should be the ultimate manifestation of your understanding. These will make up your deliverables grade.
The expected weights of these two parts of the course are given in the table below.
| Element | Weight |
|---|---|
| Assignments | 50% |
| Deliverables | 50% |
Individual items will be evaluated using triage grading. Late work, including tardiness to a meeting where presentations are required, is always unsatisfactory.
Students and faculty are bound by the Student Academic Ethics policy of the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities. This means that the work you submit is entirely your own except where you clearly indicate otherwise, such as with citations or references.
To be clear, if you did not write something, it is not entirely your own. Output from tools such as ChatGPT and Grammarly are not your own.
In all meetings, you are expected to refrain from activity that hinders others’ success. Tardiness, vulgarity, and profanity are examples of such disruptions. Discussion that is unrelated to our meeting objectives should be kept to a minimum.
