Developing a New Major

ideas for first semester

• they need an assignment to play games and blog - we have categories of games - by genre, by hardware platform, by studio, by strongest characteristic, by success. They have to play games from each category and blog about them. Everybody could be doing a different category each week (so the games will go around) but over hte course of the semester they have to do 5 - 1 every 2 weeks. Goal is to get them to focus on that characteristic in depth in a game or two - for videogames
• same for board games -  we just play them to be playing, to get experience. we go for variety.so need to play in class and have assignments where they play outside of class
• COuld we move the domino and card game making activity to first semester - simple/uninformed approaches to making games,
• COuld also talk about aesthetics and rules and cheating  and briefly about marketing and picking an audience - so figure out what topics to spin off of making board games. could do a little photoshop intro to talk about making the board graphics.
• move the book report exercise to this fall semester class - and have them pick 2 or 3 of the questions to answer
• definitely want to talk more about mmos - community manager is a job they could get while still in school maybe (connects marketing and development, good to be in development meetings to hear what’s being proposed and hopefully talk about how users might react, could update development teams with stats and trends from community forum posts and events, comm mgr works to build relations with users especially the super users who will buy and try everyting related to your product - you pimp their events and websites and give them unique content and go to their events and help them set up whatever they need to create community around the game) , play with some text based (usually built with interactive fiction engines, there are game masters who create content and who work with users, these gmes have to have good solo modes, can do some things in text based games that you can’t in graphical gmes because framerate would disintegrate - like having everybody come to one spot to get a magic spell, when you have a small user base you try tings like personally greeting users as they come into the world and as base increases the personal contact goes down and you put in things like tutorials, people want to customize and make their stuff unique even in text descriptions)  and browser based mmos (they have lower barriers of entry, they’re less intimidating than big mmo’s, they can be bridget games for a probably small portion of casual gamers to more hard core games)
• intro brainstorming

ideas for second semester

• we need to look more at game mechanics from traditional games - collecting, racing, matching… need to focus on the board games and their mechanics so their board games are better. Use the domino and card games they made first semester as examples this semester - see what they did right and what htey did wrong, then build more board/card/domino/pyramid games to talk about their mechanics.have specific milestone dates, use the google spreadsheets in their groups (i put in the main milestones, their group might (should) come up with others)
• so need a different book for the 2nd semester - maybe something about making board/card games
• need to talk about ratings in videogames and any board/card game equivalents
• need to talk about playtest in a lecture before they do it - goals, difference between play testing, playing, quality assurance, need playtest forms
• need to talk about how to balance traditional analog games
• need some specific assignments on the audience reseach and game marketing (first semester just mention, look at some classic ads)
• blog this semester could be a group development blog - weekly or more frequent updates, pics of development, notes from their out of class meetings, final versions of their documentation, share the process, becomes raw materials for their final paperwork
• do more brainstorming practice - then after they’ve picked topic and done some research, have a brainstorm session in class
• need some readings from boardgame blogs, game developer mag, game developer blogs

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