Category Archives: Teaching

Student expectations, course marketing, and the invisible labour of game development.

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There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about how universities should approach teaching videogame development and even just what the basic responsibility of game schools even is. This started with this Twitter thread by Danette Beatty from ustwo. Robert Yang wrote these good reflections in response about some of the challenges of teaching game development. Innes McKendrick wrote these good thoughts in a thread. I wrote this thread about how lacking a broad knowledge of game development disciplines is a problem in countries without large studios. Anna Anthropy wrote this good thread about balancing soft/hard skills in games education. The point across these responses: teaching game development is hard and educators and institutions alike are still trying to figure out how the heck you even do this while, at the same time, the global game industry is dramatically restructuring itself.

There’s one side of the discussion I haven’t really seen come up yet that I encountered first hand in the classroom: the fact that the overwhelming number of students who enter game development programs have no idea what the everyday work of game development actually entails. Worse, many of them have wrong ideas about what one does day-to-day to make games. I want to talk a bit about how this happens, how the marketing for game dev programs often exploit this ignorance, and how the responsibility typically falls on teachers to ensure these students know what they are actually getting in for.  Continue reading →

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This week, my Studio 2 class have been working on their ‘Art Game’ brief. This is one of my favourite briefs of the trimester. My students must visit the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, choose an artwork that speaks to them, and adapt this artwork into a videogame work over the course of a single week. I assess the term ‘adapt’ pretty loosely. They might consider how the meaning of the artwork is altered by the medium of videogames. They might find something interesting in the artist’s intentions or story that they want to draw from. They might find something in their own response to the artwork they want to explore. They might try to simply recreate the experience but in an interactive or navigable manner. All I really want from the project is for them to consider how art expresses ideas broadly and the relationship between videogames and other creative media. And for them to make some weird, experimental stuff. In the past, the brief has produced some really great works. The combination of the short turnaround and the ‘arty’ tone of the brief allows the students to just take risks and make something really out there. Here’s a collection of what they made.

As I did with Edge in a previous trimester, I also wanted to do this project myself. When we IMG_1753went to GOMA, there was a small exhibition on perspective that included a range of interesting video works. One in particular really captured my attention: The Fall From Raiatea by Denis Beaubois, as part of the Terminal Vision project. For this work, five cathode-ray tube televisions sat side-by-side with fuzzy, distorted VHS footage on them. Each television shows footage from a different camera capturing the same event from different angles: the cameras themselves being hurled out the window of the 27th floor of an apartment building. At the start of the work, each camera is turned on, each TV flickering to life. Then Beaubois just sort of holds the rig of cameras out the window for a while, giving a real blurred look at the surrounding suburbs. This footage is already low quality, I assume, because when the cameras impacted the ground, the existing footage was affected as well. I like this idea of the future event impacting the current footage. Eventually, Beaubois flings the cameras from the window and we get this kaleidoscopic, vertigo-inducing sense as the cameras plummet to Earth, each facing a different direction. Continue reading →

An Incomplete Game Feel Reader

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There is a nebula of essays and talks that circle the concept that we reluctantly call ‘game feel’. (No one likes this term, but it’s what we’ve got. Personally, I would like it if we borrowed from music and called it timbre or, at the very least, just talked about ‘how a game feels’ rather than ‘a game’s game feel’, but whatever). Across a range of talks and essays (some directed to designers and execution, some to players and analysis) is an emergent idea of the experience of videogames not being centrally one of engaging with mechanics but, rather, of encouraged affective states. Of some sort of fusing of meaty flesh with audiovisual signs and plastic buttons.

Historically there’s been a reluctance to talk about this because it’s soft, ambiguous, and wishy-washy. Talking about a videogame being tight or crunchy or sluggish or sticky feels like it is at odds with the hardcoded and definitive code and programming logic and on/off switches that videogames are made out of. We have historically intellectualised videogames as hard configurative systems while downplaying the fact that the reason we really play a videogame is because it feels real good within our soft meaty body. Videogames are a carnal pleasure. Continue reading →

Edge

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My Game Design Studio 2 class is currently working on a short, one-week project. On Monday, we visited GOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art. They were tasked with finding an artwork that spoke to them, and over the following week they are to create a videogame adaptation of that artwork. I’ve left what I mean by ‘videogame adaptation’ pretty vague. They can either try to explore themes similar to what the artwork explores, or perhaps try to replicate the sensorial experience of engaging with that artwork. The brief I provided them with is available here (pdf).

I’ve never used this brief before in Studio 2 so we’ll see how it goes. Ideally, there’s a few things I want them to get out of this exercise. First, I’d like them to have to think about what creative works ‘do’. So thinking about things like craft, form, materiality, process, and things like that. Second, I’d like them to start thinking about what videogames do in such a context; what do terms like ‘craft’, ‘form’, ‘materiality’, and ‘process’ mean in a videogame context? Third, I just wanted my students to have to go to an art gallery.

Since I’m currently trying to make a bunch of small games this year, I’ve decided I’m going to make my own game to the brief as well. So while we were at GOMA, I walked around and had a look at the different artworks to see what stood out for me. There were a few for which I had a really immediate and corporeal reaction to. One which was an almost pitch-black room was disorientating and claustrophobic, another work played with scale in fascinating ways that made my perception incapable of grounding myself while I looked at it. Except, I realised that if I tried to replicate either of these artworks I’d end up just making a digital version of them: a black room with hardly any lighting, or a really big object next to the player. I want my students to go beyond just creating assets that look like the artwork, so I need to do the same. Continue reading →

Countryside Postmortem

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So in 2017 I’m making a bunch of videogames. The plan is to make 50 of them in 52 weeks. Most of them won’t be very good, but that’s not really the point. I just want to set a goal of a certain quantity to try to force myself into an actual rhythm of creating and learning and maybe getting better at it. Then, after a year of that, hopefully I’m in a position where I can confidently decide if Actually Making Games is something I actually want to keep doing. I’ve already made six games, and you can find them on my itch.io page, here. I’m particularly happy with Fetch and Flightboy.

One of the reasons I am doing this is, in part, to be a better game design teacher. I don’t need to know how to actually make a game in Unity to be able to do my job, but it wouldn’t hurt. And it’s interesting to try to put into practice some of the things I keep telling my students to do. And to lead by example when I tell them to just make a bunch of shit to get better at making. Since my students also have to write postmortems about the games they make, now I am going to try to do that as well.  Continue reading →

Studio 2, Diary 3 – Game 1 Postmortem

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My Studio 2 students have now finished their first game for the trimester. They had two weeks to make a short game about an experience that is personal to them. On the whole, I am really happy with how they turned out. Small things here and there could have been improved, but considering the timeline they were working on, they all went pretty good. Most importantly, I am excited by the sheer variety of directions they took the brief, with some creating very mechanics-focused sort of procedural rhetoric games and others making very experiential little vignette works.

While some initially overscoped their project (as everyone does), they all admirably worked out what was actually required for the experience they wanted to communicate to the player, and managed to really sharpen that core nugget. I’m really quite happy with how they went with the exercise.

I spent the last week pestering them all to put their games on itch.io so that I could share their games more broadly. If they’re going to have a game critic for a teacher, they might as well exploit that and actually get some exposure for their games. I was perhaps too optimistic to assume they would all create perfectly crafted itch.io pages for their game with builds for multiple platforms and gifs and all sorts of pretty things. Several of them also uploaded their games as zips; some even uploaded it as a .7z or a .rar at first, before I told them to re-upload it. All sorts of little issues that I hadn’t thought to consciously address but which create all these hurdles that might prevent a player bothering to check out your free little weird game This general self-promotion area is somewhere we could use more work.

But the games themselves turned out pretty well! So here is a little bit about all eight of the games: Continue reading →

Studio 2, Diary 2

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On Wednesday my students pitched their ideas for short games based on their personal experience. It was a really chill pitch session where we just sat in a circle and talked through our ideas. I’m pretty excited about the different ideas. All of them seem relatively well scoped and doable, and there are some legitimately interesting ideas in there. Hopefully the games match the ideas!

Before next week’s class, the students have been asked to analyse one of the games about a personal experience that was provided to them and to think about what it is about, how it is about that, and what they can learn from it for their own game.

One of the games on the list is Andi McClure’s He Never Showed Up, made for a dating sim game jam. Despite following Andi’s work for years, this is one of the few games on the list I’d never played before (a previous lecturer of Studio 2, Christy Dena, added it). It’s a simple and powerful short game about being stood up on a date. The player has a hammer and can smash apart the screens reality, knocking down buildings and the stars themselves if they want. Eventually, the player finds the elusive boy and smashes him, too—only to find out it was all a fantasy: the world was not smashed, the boy never showed up, and you were still stood up.  Continue reading →

Studio 2 Diary 1

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Dylan Schneider’s Unfinished Vignette

This trimester I am teaching a studio class at SAE Brisbane. My students have to design games that focus on meaning, expression, and emotion. Up to this point in their degree they’ve been focusing on the bits and pieces that make up a videogame. Now, at this point, I’m to try to get them to think about just what they can do with that toolkit. My interpretation of this is to show them a whole bunch of weird shit and to encourage them to make equally weird shit.

My students need to keep a blog throughout the trimester, keeping track of what they are making and why and how. In sympathy with my students and in an attempt to pressure/shame them into actually writing these blogs, I thought I should write about the course as well.

I’m increasingly convinced that students should be playing and making the sort of stuff you would see on itch.io moreso than the stuff you would see on Steam. There’s several reasons for this. First of all, the sort of weird experimental games on itch.io are not necessarily ‘better’, but they are often doing more interesting things from a purely design perspective. ‘More interesting’ in the sense that most students have already played a first-person shooter and a moba and a platforming game and playing new first-person shooters/mobas/platforming games is only going to teach them so much. Whereas the sort of experimental stuff on itch.io is constantly pushing the boundaries of how videogames can say things. Continue reading →