GROUP FINAL PROJECT

BENCHMARK 1

Project Groundrules - Even before you start work in this benchmark, you should know where I'm taking you. In this project, each team is to design & develop an original, serious game. This means a game with some educational value where those who play the game come away from the game learning something of value. What will they learn? Well, that's up to you, but make sure it's something worthwhile. Your game itself may be derivative of other existing games, but conceptually & creatively speaking, try to make it truly your own vision. You may be presenting it to prospective employers, so this represents your own creative abilities as well as your technical skills.

Now we're making a game! - In your individual projects, the emphasis was on learning the techniques for building necessary technologies to make our games. As a result, we mostly neglected gameplay and polish. In this project, there is a much greater emphasis on game design, and so the expectation level is considerably higher. Note that you may update or radically change your game design as the project moves along. Your game must provide meaningful play, it should be fun, and it should educate in some way. Bugs should be minimized, as should memory leaks, or incomplete levels and implementations. The expectation is that each team will produce a game that can be enjoyed by others, in fact, you might want to recruit friends, neighbors, and even enemies to playtest and give feedback for your game. In coming up with your design, try to map it to what you feel you are capable of completing. It's good to be ambitious and take chances, but also be realistic.

As your own work, teams are required to produce:


Game Design: The broad game design concepts should be developed via a collaborative effort. You may make games of any genre (Strategy, Action, Puzzle, RPG, etc.), but make sure it makes use of scrolling, sprite animation, and collision detection. If your game defines classification in any genre, that might be a really good thing. This course is about building real-time game architectures, not things like card games or board games (which may be good ideas, but are not appropriate for our projects).

Level Design: In this project, students are required to experience in part the roles of game designer, artist, sound engineer, & programmer. As part of this, each team should construct a game with as many levels as there are team members. So if a team has 3 members, each individual should be responsible for designing a level. This means laying out the level, specifying rules governing gameplay and interaction, implementing AI, creating artwork & sound effects, and selecting music. Understand that some artwork and sound effects may be shared among levels (particularly those regarding a main character). In addition, each level must have gameplay elements that make it unique, not just the same level as a previous one with different artwork & music plugged in.


Presentations: All projects will be presented to the class instructor & TA throughout the day on Tuesday, May 12th at which time grades will be assigned and the top games will be selected to be finalists in Stony Brook's Game Programming Contest on Friday, May 15th at the Wang Center. Grades will be assigned based on projects meeting technical requirements as well as an evaluation of gameplay and to a lesser degree, artistry. In addition, part of each student's grade will be determined by the presentation itself. Each student will be asked specific questions about the work he/she did to ensure they played an important role in the game's development. The intention of these questions is also to ensure all students have the adequate knowledge expected for passing this course. Understand that presentation grades may differ among students in the same group. If a group member is unable to answer important questions that indicate a lack of participation, that student's grade may be reduced separately from the team.

Finally, each team will produce a flyer advertising their game, which will be handed out during project presentations.


Benchmark 1 Requirements: In this benchmark you will setup your group project page, select a group name & logo, select a name for your group's game, define the initial design document & storyboards, and code the program's GUI. To complete this benchmark, do the following:

  1. Select a team (company) name & corporate logo, & URL for project work and post to the appropriate Blackboard forum.
    • Once you've decided on your game, want to copyright it? Too bad, copyrighting of game ideas is very limited. You can copyright components of your game, for that try going to the U. S. Copyright Office.
    • In case you like your team partners enough that you think you should go into business together, try going to the U. S. Small Business Association.
    • Maybe you wish to try and sell your game idea? Well, try looking at Sloperama for advice.

  2. Select a game name and describe it completely using a game design document & storyboards. You should be describing your levels at this time as well. I would advise you to look at the design docs that each of your teammates did for their individual project and select the nicest format.

  3. Code your welcome screen and game menu GUI. Understand that your GUI should be professional looking and should meet the same requirements as in the individual project. Also, your game should simply display your shoryboards as in that project. Again, look at the GUIs of your team members and pick the nicest format. As far as your GUI is concerned, you may make changes later on, but for this benchmark you should have at least a prelimnary format up and running. You will be well served to nail this down now so you won't have to fix it later when you have more difficult issues to worry about.

SUBMITTING YOUR HW:

A LOOK AHEAD

For the next benchmark groups will create a game prototype which will be a small, playable version of what your ultimate game will be.

GO AHEAD TO BENCHMARK 2

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by Richard McKenna