Considering Large Student Teams in Game Development Education: A Post-Mortem

This paper presents a post-mortem of a large-scale "megateam" model for game development education, in which an entire class of roughly 70 students collaborates on a single game. Its central argument is that student projects typically resemble small indie studios, while most students aspire to work at AAA studios whose dynamics, including handoffs between teams, shifting team sizes, shared vision under uncertainty, and structured communication, are underrepresented in current curricula. The author proposes that the standard small-team student project should be reconsidered and that scaled-up, and potentially staggered or multi-generational, team structures may better prepare students for professional practice. The work is explicitly provocative rather than empirical, offering the megateam as a hypothesis for further study.

The primary case examined is a semester-long boardgame design course from 2022 that organized its students into nine sub-teams with defined pipeline dependencies, three development phases, and contract-based grading. The author reports several notable successes, including design pillars generated collectively by the class, a decision-making framework known as the chicken/pig model, and a reflective class post-mortem in which students recognized 10 of 17 anticipated barriers as major issues. The principal shortcomings were students' difficulty planning across multiple sprints, declining motivation that ultimately led the class to forgo presenting its finished game, and insufficient instructor scaffolding for coordination and for the administration of contract grading.

A second megateam project, examined in the concluding section, did not deliver a completed game within the available timeframe. The author nonetheless judges it a valuable learning experience for both students and instructor, and uses it to argue that large AAA-scale production requires skills distinct from, though fundamentally related to, those developed in small teams. The paper concludes that educators must continually revisit their assumptions as production methods in the game industry evolve, and it supplies a bibliography of roughly sixty references spanning game development education, industry practice, and project management.