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

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.