"How can we support student game developer teams on their first collaborative project?"
Evaluate milestone meetings for risks and improvements, and frequently check in with all teams to test games, provide feedback, and ask about difficulties with the projects.
As a teacher and designer, this has probably been my favorite job 🤎. I truly love engaging with others' art, analyzing, and asking provoking questions to facilitate whatever progress they are trying to make.
Competencies
- Consulted for around 10 student teams on game design, development, and team processes.
- Attended milestone meetings, provided presentation feedback.
- Resolved interdisciplinary challenges and interpersonal conflicts.
- Heard and empathized for the difficulties students faced, provided emotional support and suggestions to persevere.
Findings
- Students' greatest risk was almost always non-communicative teammates, and we'd have to find mitigations that didn't involve taking over another's workload.
- Frequent check-ins prompted teams to reflect on immediate issues preventing them from getting playtest feedback.
- Students learned more from expanding on simple game ideas than struggling to build more complex ones to a playable state.
Context
As mentioned in the project page for Mu and The Little Reef, these are students working for the first time as interdisciplinary teams to create game projects in 2 semesters. While TA's were expected mostly to attend milestone meetings when possible and be open to contact by students with questions, I enjoyed taking as proactive an approach I could. I went to team spaces during lab hours and asked to playtest their games, or helping them assess how to get to playtesting as quick as possible.