COMP 23: Introduction to Game Development

Fall 2015 Semester Personal Engagement Project

Due: Any class day before the last day of class

This assignment is worth 5% of your overall grade.

Overview

Because game development is a particularly creative field, we expect every student in the class to participate in ways not explicitly defined by the curriculum and syllabus.

What's the Point of This?

We want our students to be strong in: (1) taking responsibility for one's own learning, and (2) actively engaging with a larger community outside the classroom (e.g., a professional group). Game Development is not only a creative field but it also presents many opportunties outside the classroom. We can't teach you everything about game development in this class nor can we show you all the opportunities that are out there. We want to give you the flexibility and freedom to pursue to explore what is out there with regards to Game Development. We want to grow your intellectual curosity and make you take responsibility of your own learning. We want to see you engaged with the game development community in some capacity outside of the classroom --that's where the real learning is. Finally, you can teach us something new.

Ideas

• Create a game of your own.
• Create a piece of media that could be used in a game. For instance:
  • 2D or 3D art
  • Original music or sound content
• Write an essay that challenges a commonly accepted idea or proposes a new one.
• Build a tool to help game developers
• Interview a professional game developer
• Go to a game development group meeting in the area. Example: Boston Post Mortum
• Extend an open source project pertaining to games. Example: Phaser

Deliverables

1. A short 5 minute stand-up presentation about your work. The last ten minutes of every class this semester will be reserved for stand-up presentations.
2. A report that details: (1) the reason why you chose this direction, (2) what did you learn from your venture, and (3) what would you do differently if you had more time
3. Supporting material. This can be anything including source code, video or audio files, website, etc.

Assessment

Grading will be based on effort and quality.