There will be a few products in addition to your games that you will produce as part of the class:
The first two are working documents that are actually part of your project, just not the part your users would see:
- Design Board
- Design Docs
Design Board
The design board is the record of your work and decisions. It’s how you keep working even though you might not all be able to meet in person during the week in between classes. If you’re still unclear on the concept or how to make, use, or share a design board, read this.
Design Docs
Your design docs can take many forms. You can look in Chapter 24 of Schell or search the internet for ideas for yours. An easy default would be a Google doc. This should be the scaffold around your construction site, the bit that holds up your design while you are working on it. For example, you don’t want all of your game text to only live in ARIS. It is hard to see and reflect on there. I should be able to look at it to help understand the details of your design to give good feedback.
The latter two are reflective and creative in their own ways. They are two very different formats for representing your creative work and for asking for further support.
- A Project Proposal
- A “Kickstarter” Page
Project proposal
This is a formal paper submission, derived from the Games Learning and Society annual conference template. Your work this semester is aligned with the values of the conference in many ways. When I make games that involve place and/or learning, this is often the place I’m hoping to later talk about them. In addition to simplifying the format a bit from what the conference actually uses, I added a section on content to give you a suggested outline and major sections for the paper. You don’t have to follow this but it might be easiest. Each section has some leading questions. You don’t need to directly answer them—they are supposed to help describe the purpose of the section to you.
This proposal (minus the post mortem and discussion sections) will be first due in Week 12. After feedback, a final version will be due at the end of the semester. This will include revisions and the additional sections.
The purpose of this artifact is for you to practice the skills of academic writing, even the stupid parts (see that part about endnotes), to practice analytic and critical thinking within a specific domain, and to reflect on the creative work that you’re engaged in. Probably no one else other than me will ever read it, but the practice will hopefully help for the next time you need to do writing like this, and maybe the forced, careful reflection will help you think through your project too, presenting new insights in time to show in your final showcase. At least that’s what critical thinking and analysis are supposed to be good for.
Notice that unlike our work so far in Markdown, this is a Word doc. Despite its drawbacks, Word is still the lingua franca of official submissions at least in my neck of the woods. Most people I know write in some other software/format that is actually nice to write in and then export to Word when they are done and there match the formatting guidelines. You can simply work in drive if you want too. This is usually what I do.
“Kickstarter” Page
This is a showcase of your design, modeled after Kickstarter. My hope is that we can excerpt just these to our course website to show to the world after class is over. Hopefully these will be read by others. It is an advertisement for your cool ideas and hard work.
I will create a Markdown template to follow. If you want to see how the Markdown renders it might be best to do this using HackMD. Even though it’s a pain to pick up something new, this will make it very easy to publish this information in many places without significant rework.
The “Kickstarter” page will also be due in rough form by Week 15 (so the people we invite to our showcase can see what to expect). You will have time to make revisions and turn in a final version by the end of the semester.
