Game Engines 2021W Project Guidelines

This page contains guidelines on the class project. This page will be updated based on questions and feedback.

Project Proposal

Your project proposal should be a relatively short document describing what you plan to do for your project. You should propose to make an original game, mechanics demonstration, or engine extension/modification.

Your proposal should:

• Have a title and your name
• List collaborators and explain how the collaboration will work
• Explain your motivation for what you are doing
• Describe what you plan to do
• Present what preliminary work you've done
• Outline your development plan, including milestones and dates
  • Be sure to include what you hope to have done by the preliminary report
  • Leave enough time to write your final report

Your proposal will be graded based on the following criteria:

• 40% Writing & presentation quality (organization, grammar, flow)
• 40% Technical scope
• 20% Creativity

I may change the relative weights of the categories, but only if it results in a better grade (i.e., a project that is really creative but not so technically demanding might get 40% creativity, 20% technical scope).

Note that part of technical scope is whether what you propose is doable within the time you have. So, if you propose something very ambitious you should have a lot of preliminary work completed.

Progress Report

• Discuss what you've done since the proposal.
• Explain how your progress compares to what you originally proposed.
• Provide drafts of what you can for the final report.
  • No need to repeat things from the proposal.
  • However, you may want to present revised parts of your proposal if your plans have changed
• This should be bringing together recent journal entries and organizing them, expanding them
  • Maybe a lot of expansion if your progress reports have all been short

Grading will be based on the overall quality of the progress you've made versus the proposal.

You may ask for no-penalty extensions.

Final Report

Your report should have the following sections:

• Introduction/Overview
  • what did you do?
• Inspirations/Background
  • What led to what you did?
  • inspiring games, articles, daydreams, whatever
  • make sure to cite inspirations where feasible
• Design
  • high-level description of what you built
• Implementation
  • details, how it exists in Godot
  • ideally explain object hierarchies & scenes, code structure
  • enough detail that someone who looks at your code will have a basic idea of what is going on, how to find bits they are interested in
  • if chunks of your implementation came from outside sources, just give a high level summary of it and cite the source
• Iteration/Evaluation
  • organize what you wrote in your journal, what was the process?
  • how close did you get to what you wanted to do?
  • what are the major issues remaining?
  • report on any playtesting or other testing you did
  • cite resources that helped you along the way
• Lessons Learned
  • what do you know now that you didn't know at the start of the term?
• Conclusion

Grading will be based on:

• 30% Writing & presentation quality (organization, grammar, flow)
• 30% Technical scope
• 20% Creativity
• 20% Evaluation/Process

Again, the weighing may be changed.