Game Engines 2021W Project Guidelines

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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.