Preamble
I usually hate lists and especially because they obscure more than they communicate, but sometimes they can say everything you need to say very quickly.
I’m not a game developer. I’m a game educator, and a couple of other things. So read these with that in mind. I have seen about 200 student games made in degrees in several Universities, I sit on the advisory panels for six other degrees around the world, and I’ve externally judged batches of final year student games about a dozen times now. So I have some experience that might be useful if you’re a game student (of any stripe – art, design, programming) heading into those nebulous final year studio production subjects. Or if you’re also an educator, you may find things to disagree with that make sense given your context or particular degree.
Here goes.
(You’ll notice there’s no nebulous ones like HAVE FUN or BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAMS or SMASH THE STATE. This is about as practical as I get.)
Ten Things Game Students Should Know Before Starting Their Final Project
The end of a game design or development degree is a weird space to be in. Lots of people in and out of the game industry are ambivalent about what game degrees should and shouldn’t do – but there is broad agreement that attempting to produce and finish games in some sort of group – and send them out into the world – should be the cornerstone.
It is also a huge and insane opportunity to make something reasonably complex and have it all come together and then at some other point, have it cause joy, confusion, disgust or wonder in other people – in the ways and means in which culture is causing those emotions the most these days, the computer.
These are ten things I emphasise after seeing hundreds of game students make their final year games.
1. Games Are A Community.
This means a couple of things.
If you care about your game, other people will want to see you succeed and may help you ‘raise the barn’. Reaching out to people for feedback, ideas and different kinds of help is always a good idea. Even to people you think are out of reach. Speak to your lecturers if there’s any problem with exterior help, but 90% of them would be thrilled to hear you’ve found a musician friend to make a song for the game, or that you’ve sourced feedback on the prototype or idea from a local developer on your own initiative. The game comes first.
Student game projects work best when the group looks after each other and becomes a community in itself. This sounds touchy-feely but in practice, a lost week due to an argument can have a nuclear effect on the project. Manage your discussions, ideas and clashes unlike you have in the past. Take personality differences seriously, and manage them together. Agree to disagree. The time has come to put away childish things (like ego). The game comes first. Later, your ego will thank you.
2. Scope.
The biggest problem with most student games is that they try to achieve too much and get lost in the production process which quickly spirals out of their hands. Its absolutely crucial to understand just how little you will be able to do with the time you have and with other classes to deal with. The most common things I say to students who have over-scoped is “Scrap all the areas but one” followed by “scrap all the characters but one.” This is thunderously common and really important. If the project takes off and everybody is working well together, that second room won’t take long. Cut everything until you have a series of wounds, then rebuild the idea.
3. Beware The Story-Driven Concept.
For whatever reason, this ends up forming an immense list of features that a AAA developer would struggle to fill out. A mixture of art ideas, early concept art that got people excited, and a shared love of genre will end up producing a huge overwrought game design document or plan that can then sit in Dropbox and murder your dreams one by one all semester long. Think of story as something that needs to be developed alongside everything else, if at all. The student method is different to the Valve method, the Blizzard method, etc.
Using a narrative concept to drive art production and gameplay planning is fine – but more often than not the story-driven student games are an exercise in game design document fabrication that quickly become the evil twin, not the support beams for the actual game.
4. “We Must Make A Genius Mechanic” – No, You Don’t.
This is becoming more and more of a trend and its quite understandable, with the popularity of easily-communicated mechanic-based platformers like Braid, etc. But really? Settle down. Genius can be in the execution of an old mechanic, polished well. It can be in the art style. Execute on what you know you can do, push yourselves, and let creativity speak through your craft, not through your ideas. Your ideas will get better as you make more games – you won’t automatically begin with the freshest ideas in the world. Don’t buy into the pressure.
5. Build From The Group’s Strengths.
Every year, I see a project where one (or two, or even three!) students are dedicating themselves to ‘concept art’ which they see as pre-production for the project and then which will translate to an easier process to make the 2d or 3d models. But if you have all this firepower in the concept art department, why isn’t the game including it? Why not use those gorgeous characters that took you a week to do as dialogue portraits? Don’t have dialogue portraits? Maybe you should. Why not use the skill to finesse the sky texturing? And so on.
If you’ve been taught that pre-production has certain work that belongs in it and then those pieces of work don’t relate to the game – you make a document, you do the planning, you make the art – then realise that the pre-production phase is now already over. No matter when in the year you read this.
6. Relax About The Game Design Document.
Many game design degrees are in the business of teaching the process of making game design documents. There’s a huge ongoing discussion about their value at pretty much every course advisory committee where some industry advisors will say they’re totally pointless and that other more professional documentation and planning is more important. Others will say its a good stepping stone to understanding and planning techniques.
Honestly, after some years, I think game degrees use them as a crutch. They’re easier to teach and assess and they fit within the design paradigm of a lot of universities. These days, I want to see the artists make moodboards and do their visual research, the designers organise their plans and rationalise design decisions, and I want to see both of them support and work with the programmers (if any) with clear and concise needs, and always giving clear and concise feedback. The game design document, if it exists, should be razor sharp and about the same thickness.
7. Sound Matters.
The end. Organise and prepare time to work on the sound. Free clips of dubstep and bits and bobs you hack together from somewhere else are merely serviceable. But any attempt to do something bespoke for your game will pay off.
8. Understand That The Game Is Going Public.
A lot of student groups will kick off thinking they need to describe their game as (for example) “PC, Xbox 360 and PS3”. When what they mean is “we are using UDK or Unity and we are hoping it looks nice by the end of it.” This is part of a series of other hang ups students can gather about showing and publicly discussing their work. Sometimes timidity, or other forces can stop good projects from getting seen and played.
If your year schedule ends in October or November, the IGF Student Showcase is free to enter and generally has a submission date of 31st. Very few student games bother to do this. Don’t rely on your lecturers (you should know this by now!) to enter for you. Enter local competitions. Enter anything you can. It will give a sharp and focussed deadline that will matter more to you than the subject’s final assignment date.
9. Use Your Education.
Even if you are salty about the degree you’re about to finish, you’ve got an education. Whether you like it or not, your game is an expression of it – so its likely that there’s material you produced for assignments that are worth revisiting to examine your old ideas, your old working methods. This is especially true if you had subjects working in game engines like Unity – often students will comment that they had to re-learn certain skills and went back to their old assignments to look at what they’d done. ‘
Maybe you had a weird subject that talked about playground design in the 1960s or sociology, or psychology, or media studies, or something which at the time seemed irrelevant. Keep in mind before you close the door on all that for the last time than many (MANY) senior game designers, when asked about game design degrees, think that people should get a classical education before being game designers.
Student games are not the arena we look to for the most polished, most finished and advanced games. But they should by all accounts be bringing all sorts of weird and differently-educated people to game design. The originality impulse that many students crave might be satisfied by mining the education they thought was peripheral to making games.
10. Make. Make. Make.
Game production and iteration have a hundred models taught in a hundred game design degree formats. Your degree will have taught you a particular combination of skills and called it a workflow. But 9 times out of 10, you know your way around a game engine better than most of your lecturers. Trust the process of production. Have a prototype up as early as you can and damn well use it. If the group is feeling intimidated by the prospect of kicking off in the engine, all the more reason to start.
Make stuff. Make the art. Block out the levels. Quickly. Go.