Monthly Archives: August 2011

Submission Guidelines: All documentation should be on your web page

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Folks, when we ask for you to put your submissions on a web page, and to put a discussion of what you did, how the game works, what your plans are, and so on, we really mean for you to put everything on the page.  Put your discussion, the details of what you’ve done, and so on, on the page.

We do not want a Word or PDF file to download.  If we want something to download, we will tell you; for example, you will need to create a video, a writeup and a presentation for your final submission — those should be downloadable.

But for A0, P1-P6,  W1-W8, the Alpha and the Playtest demos, we want all the information right there, visible and easy to read.

thanks.

Assignment 0: How to submit (clarification)

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A student sent me this question:

Professor MacIntyre,

I am little bit confused on where we are supposed to be posting this assignment. I created a web player version of the tutorial that I did, but I am unclear on where to post it to. Any help would be appreciated.

Sorry this wasn’t clear.  You post it to your own web page (prism will work;  if you have a hosting service, you can use that) and then submit the URL via the assignment submission system in t-square.

Instructions for Group Website

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Each group should create a website for their project.  On the syllabus, we said

Each team is expected to maintain a webpage that will be linked to from this site.  This page will, in turn, have a list of group members, the game design idea, all the game turn-ins, the final game, all game prototypes, and the final video.  The content should be neatly and concisely laid out on this page.  All game projects are expected to be targeted to Unity’s web plugin, so all of the game milestones will be playable on your web page, and available to the your classmates and anyone on the internet who stumbles on your page.

This should manifest itself in a straightforward structure:

  • The main page should have the group information, members, short description of the game (eventually), and links to subpages
  • The subpages would include:
    • A pitch page. This will contain a longer version of the content you will present rapidly in class. A short description of the game idea, the core mechanics and the initial plan for the 6 prototypes. Any additional information you have about your design, including scanned in sketches or other brainstorming content, can be put here. Whatever you think will help convey the ideas.
    • One page per prototype (6 pages).
    • One page per weekly turning (8 pages).
    • One page for the alpha build.
    • One page for the play-testing build.
    • One page for the final build, with the final project turn-in materials (video, slides, etc.)

Assignment Note: No DGML

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We should have pointed out in class:  as the DGML is not available till next week (Sept 5th), this assignment also serves to get everyone to set up Unity (free version) on their own computers.   Sorry for not mentioning this;  it’s one of those things that happens every semester (DGML not set up till a few weeks in), which is why this first assignment is purposely simple.

But, as the person who comments on the assignment page said, don’t waste your time walking over to the DGML to do the assignment; you need to use your own computer.

Assignments will go on their own pages

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In case you didn’t notice, there is now a drop-down menu under “assignments” on the main blog page;  you should see a link to “Assignment #0” there.  We will put pages for the other assignments and project deliverables there.

Slides for lecture 1

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Folks, I’ve decided to post slides here instead of t-square.  I think it’s good for our courses to be as open as possible, and I’ve long bemoaned that as we put more and more course content in t-square, less and less of what we do is visible to the outside world.   I will like the slides to the schedule, and sometimes do a blog post (like this) if there is more to add (e.g., pointers to URLs or resources we talked about).

Here is a direct like to the Overview Slides I showed first class.

Late Policy

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Late submission will have 25% taken off the grade immediately, and an additional 25% taken off for each additional day.  A day is 24 hours from the specific time the assignment is due (e.g., if something is due at 6am Monday, and it turned in at 6:01am Monday, it is 25% off;  if it’s turned in at 5:59am Tuesday, it’s 25% off but will be 50% off at 6:00am Tuesday).

Collaboration with SCAD-Atlanta and the Berklee School of Music

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This semester, we are going to try an experiment in collaboration.

First, students will be offered the opportunity to apply to join a group of students in the Game program at SCAD-Atlanta (the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus) and work on a game project there.  The project there will be much more process-oriented, and the groups will be made up of students from SCAD and (hopefully) GT (and possibly even SPSU).  The students who join those groups will be required to do some additional work at GT before SCAD begins their quarter, and after the quarter ends; this will be discussed directly with those students.  Tony Tseng from SCAD will be supervising the SCAD classes, with participation from the GT instructors (Maribeth and Blair).

Second, we will be collaborating with students from the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where students in their Video Game Scoring classes and clubs will be available to join our groups, and create original scores and sounds for the games.  This is an amazing opportunity to both improve the quality of your prototypes, but also gain experience working in a realistic game programming situation.  Michael Sweet, from Berklee, will do a video presentation on how this will work.