Game a Week: Teaching Students to Prototype

[Music] all right we're gonna get started so we've been told to let you know to turn your cell phones off will make them silent before we get going so this this talk is about a class that we've both been running where students make a prototype every week of the semester but it's really it's really about more than just learning to make prototypes and which is the main theme of this talk so first some quick introductions to we are I'm Douglas Wilson I'm a lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia where I teach and research game design I also co-owned a game studio d beautiful breack based in Copenhagen Denmark and I'm Bennett Fadi I teach at the NYU game centre and I make indie games as well the most recent of which was getting over it with Bennett 40 in 2014 I

started running a class in our master's program at NYU where students make a digital game every single week of the semester and Doug later adapted it for the bachelors students at RMIT in Australia so in this talk we're going to explain why we did that and how we implemented it and how that turned out after my first year teaching at NYU I was starting to feel concerned that there was like a handful of things that I wanted to teach students said I wanted them to get from me that I couldn't get into a normal style of game production class students who came to us as very strong coders usually been taught to engineer their code for large scope projects so for small projects I think that habit tends to lock them into creative ideas too early in the process and it prevents them from experiment and experimenting in the kind of free way that I wanted to see but we also get weak coders weaker coders with skills and other domains who could work very creatively and freely accept that

writing code makes the whole process too slow to make fast iteration feasible feasible so because of those two problems students tend to over commit to their seeded seed ideas and they spend all of their time building first idea rather than trying out different ones and seeing which ideas are good because most digital game classes involve students making just one or two projects they get very invested in them emotionally and I think that makes it very hard to give the kind of robust critique I want to give without discouraging them you want to be able to get them to recognize and abandon done promising ideas really early on but in fact what happens normally is you just wind up helping them to make the best of a bad idea and that makes it really hard to help the students build a certain like a personal sense of good taste over time as well and I think finally if you're at school learning game design I think making games is homework for you and homework generally not as joyful as a real creative practice so I felt like

I wanted a class that would address some of those challenges structurally Doug and I are indie game developers and the idea that we could solve these problems by changing the classic format comes from the spirit of rapid prototyping and jamming that has been prevalent in the indie games community and of course one of the biggest sources of inspiration for the idea is the experimental gameplay project where a group of four CMU students led by Kyle Gabler made a game prototype every week more or less and posted them online and that ran for two semesters in the academic year of 2005 and it generated a lot of great stuff including the prototype for World of Goo but was never formalized into a class I'm sorry go ahead yeah more recently there's been a few popular articles and talks about game a week as a strategy for budding indie game developers so for example Rami Ismail who Cowen's the Dutch studio Vlambeer famously wrote about game a week in 2014 you can find that article

on Gamasutra and actually Romney's post directly inspired a number of game makers of including OG Rafa moto who went on to make the successful roguelike game down well from a game a week process also in 2014 Adria Wallach gave a GDC Europe talk about a game a week as an indie dev methodology this is actually really useful talk that explains the benefit it's the game of week method and I show it to my students in week one of my class because you can find this online christa carla has been coordinating the one game a month project on the internet which is by now a master really large followings kind of culturally very deeply in indie games and I think the sorts of projects show that committing yourself to a regular cadence of projects is a really great way to build up speed and also to try out left-field ideas generally and enjoy the process of of making video games but we had an idea that there could be additional benefits

to that practice in the context of a formal class particularly if we added certain additional pedagogical structures so let's look a little bit at how we set it up at NYU the class exists in two years master's level class two years master's level course which is limited to students we've already made at least one game by themselves and demonstrated some basic level of comfort with their tools so I don't want it to be a class about learning to use unity or GameMaker or anything like that I want it to be about exploring creative ideas it's about six hours of class time per week about two hours of that is given up to presentations and feedback and the rest is just work time students have to submit a playable digital game every week and their grade is really heavily penalized if they miss more than one week so there's a lot of social pressure and a lot of structural

pressure to turn something in every week and every week's game is produced according to a given prompt or a constraint like make a game about rainbows or make a game that uses only one button being forced to dream up new ideas is part of the benefit of the class so I just want to make sure that they don't just hit up their old notebooks and and remake old ideas I tell the students that good work in the context of this class should answer a particular honor unanswered question by testing the value of an original mechanic or an aesthetic design by solving a design problem with an existing type of game or by seeing if a game can produce a certain original type of experience you can't get a good grade just by making pac-man the games only need to run they don't have to be bug free and it's fine if they only work if you play them sort of generously in a certain way so long as they form a useful answer of some kind or a useful test and I get them to do all their projects alone as a

way of ensuring that students broaden their skillset and learn new ways to generate ideas and implement them of course there's weeks where nothing comes together and the result is a project which runs but doesn't really achieve or show anything and I make students still in those cases formally present that work partly to resist the idea that anyone's process is failure free and partly to share what they learned from that process of failure with each other so that's one crucial way that it differs from gamer week outside of the for the class format all these structures apply a lot of pressure which is not their and self a self imposed game a weak structures so that pressure ensures a very high completion rate normally close to 100 percent of all the projects come in but it's also really stressful so to try to relax their pressure and encourage freedom of experimentation in these students I only grade them on the best three prototypes they make over the course of the semester as selected by me at the end of the semester so that emphasizes fast

failure and creative risk-taking yeah so the RMIT version of this so in 2016 I took XD job at RMIT and inspired directly by Bennett I wanted to bring this class format and evolve it for our program so for our first offering that year which I coordinated the class was taught by our PhD student and local Melbourne indi Michael McMaster who's in the audience hi Michael so I want to note that the syllabus that I'll share at the end of this talk is actually partially built on Michael's syllabus this past year at 2017 Michael and I co-taught the class so the classes specifically for second-year undergrads and our game design degree so note that this class did not actually include any games programming stood who are in a different school in a different degree our students that are mighty games are mostly visual artists and designers and in Australia you tend

to apply to a specific program so our students have been taking game classes and focusing on game classes from day one so at this point in the curriculum before they take game a week they've already taken classes and game maker and unity and 3d art prototyping play testing and more by the way this year coming year we may actually start bringing in some of the games programming students to join which would be great but otherwise game at week is is not an elective it's not open to other other degrees this class the game week is actually one of three different streams the students can ballad into so only about a third of our students end up taking the class and they do so explicitly by choice which is really important which we'll talk a little bit about later it's a 24 credit point class which means it's about a half their semester workload so in essence game a week counts as like two of their four classes for the semester and so it's

three hours of seminar plus three hours of studio per week in the three-hour seminar we play all their game submissions from the previous week and I do one-on-one feedback meetings or me or Michael do one-on-one feedback meetings that takes about 90 minutes to get to a class of about 23 ish people then we revealed a new theme for the coming week we lecture about relative precedents like different games or artworks that might relate to the theme and finally give them some time to brainstorm ideas and ask questions about their ideas later in the week during the the three-hour studio class it's just the students working on their gains in the lab asking us questions and getting feedback before they actually have to submit the game so in our version of the class a little unlike Bennett's students can work alone or in pairs but nothing

nothing bigger than the pair's and in fact we encourage them to try out different configurations and partners per project over the course of the semester we don't prescribe like a preferred technology many of our students use GameMaker or unity which they've learned in previous classes but sometimes we also see random alternative technologies we do want the students to be making digital games primarily in this class although we do occasionally allow non digital games that the student can pitch us on a strong idea for one so part of the trick here is to get students assembling their own tool kits and building off the work of their previous week's submissions the students do need to explore a new fundamentally new idea each week but we explicitly encourage the reuse of scripts on acids and so forth this past iteration of the class I had students submit every single week mostly because I wanted them to practice

scoping and coping even in weeks where they're super busy and learning how to deal with that however as I'll actually talk a little bit later I think this policy was a mistake I think it was a little too stressful and so this year I'm gonna give them one free skip week at their choice like that it does we grade on three explicit criteria concept functionality and style so style is there to emphasize that we want the students to find their own creative voice through this semester and it's something that Michael and I talked about explicitly in one-on-one feedback meetings and like Bennett we don't grade every single game for the same reasons Bennett mentioned in order to leave room for a pack of a half-baked the prototypes and failures so in the end we end up grading four of their 11 games at various milestones throughout the semester what matters most is that they submit something each week to avoid a deduction so there's some cultural

differences both between Matt Matt Bevin bachelor's and master's students and also between American and Australian students so we don't do everything exactly the same at NYU in general I'm trying to avoid showing students sample games I think MFA's generally come to us and very literate in games but when I showed them president games every week that were relevant to the theme I felt as though I was seeing those games influencing the work more than I wanted and I wanted their MFA students to really head out into open water creatively and to make things outside of established genres so I stopped doing that yeah I think I think really this might actually be the biggest difference between our two classes RMIT game a week is a really important place where we can build taste and expose students to lots and lots of games and artworks each week when we lecture about relative relevant precedents we'll show a video or have a student play the game on the big screen in front of the class so on average that means we get to talk about like ten

precedent games or work each week so over the course of the semester that means we get to show them like over a hundred relevant games and artworks which is a massive amount to be able to expose the students to which is really great and in fact often Michael and I would even pick our our weekly prompts based on the kinds of work that we wanted to expose the students to by the way you can see all of Michael's and my week by week lecture notes at the end of our syllabus which we'll link to at the end of the talk so some other differences Bennett has students do brief presentations to the class and also grades their participation for example when they're playing each other's games at RMIT I removed presentation and participation components in my experiences as an American working in Australia Australian universities tend to emphasize public speaking a little less compared to comparable American programs and so unsurprisingly our students are pretty

anxious about public speaking so the stress of doing gaming peak is like kind of more than enough in itself so I wanted to make the class as welcoming as possible um we do cover public speaking in a number of our other classes and I wanted game a week to be more focused both of us eliminated all readings and written work from the class to save on time you really are pressed for time as a student in this class and at first I got students to give each other feedback as part of their public presentations in front of the class I found that that tended to inhibit them from giving from from making personal work of vulnerable work and it also resulted in very shallow useless style of feedback given the number of games so we had to see so now they get and give feedback in person one on one and only after actually playing each other's games lastly we both make a theatrical ritualized presentation of the prompt every week the first time I ran this

class in 2014 I just told students the creative prompt at the beginning of the class and I think about a third of them every week we just really phone in their projects and I felt as though they had the ability and interest but their whole situation was just a bit too casual so I started making a big multimedia reveal of the prompt like this video the main thing is that it has to show some effort on my part to pressure the students to apply a similar amount of effort in their work freak down [Music] [Music] [Applause]

[Music] if you have anybody get the phone for this week second vintages so after I started doing that I found the number of phoned in projects just dropped almost to zero really really made an enormous effect sometimes I hide the prompt inside of a prototype sized game so this is a small game I made with the prompt hidden at the end of a difficult maze and by doing that at least once every year I hope to kind of indicate the correct scope for a one-week prototype but also to kind of prove to the students that prototyping is enjoyable enough that I'll choose just to do it when I don't have to and once a semester towards the end of the class when the students are starting to run out of energy I give each student a personalized prompt in a formal

invitation letter that's designed to challenge their personal boundaries and but also importantly to recognize the artistic identity that they've developed over the course of the class so here the quality of the game that they make out of this prompt isn't the point it's to explicitly recognize their individual creative voices so like a Bennett we also tried to ritualize the reveal of each prompt at our MIT class so first we'd show a short teaser video usually from film or a TV show or artwork usually something outside of games entirely and then we have students guests in class what the prompt might be so for example here for the prompt ritual I showed the famous excruciating candle carrying scene from a Tarkovsky's film nostalgia if you've ever seen this yes I make them watch like the whole nine minutes yeah and then we reveal the prompt and a nice juicy gif for example

here's that gift for that prompt ritual another example here's the gift for the theme weird input by the way all these gifts lovingly prepared by my co-instructor Michael McMaster RMIT we also posted the prompt gifts to the public on social media and encouraged our students to public to publicly post their work under the hashtag hashtag game a week 2017 in this case so this ritualization and like public performance helps make each week seem like something greater and more real than just like a homework assignment for school also logistically the hashtag allows students to opt in on their own terms like whether they do want to make their work public or not and gives instructors like me a place to point to student work without having to play favorites so instead of feeling pressure to retweet particular students I can say hey go look at the hashtag that's collected a bunch of students work another thing that we did to make

the game a week feel more like a community of art practice rather than just another university class was to arrange a public exhibition of the class games at local melbourne art game space of bar sk so this was opt-in and we had 10 students express interest so Baris Keiko founder and curator lui roots generously reviewed all the students game a week output and picked one game from each student the games were then exhibited for two weeks in Collingwood Melbourne - in two waves of five games each note that we explicitly avoided branding the event poster with the RMIT University as part of the whole goal of game week was for students to find their own artistic voice and start thinking of themselves as game developers like anyone else out in the real world rather than thinking of themselves as just students so this was this was a nice move that we were really fortunate to be able to do to kind of take that out of

out of the institution into Melbourne one of the nice things about this class structure is the students get so many attempts at coming up with the games that they're more likely to come up with at least one really great idea and that often comes after a period of sort of dialing in their process and their ideas and their tastes and developing their artistic voice so we're going to show you a few that originated in our classes with kind permission of the students jenny jalsha made morning makeup madness as part of a series of funny self-portraits in my class a game which has now been exhibited at various events around the world and I think through the through the course of the semester Jenny really found a yeah she really found a unified vision for these self-portrait games to the point where she now has this kind of internationally recognizable style in visual design and in game design and I think this game marks the turning point where her artistic voice really became

clear in this class ap Thompson made prototypes for to IGF nominated games in my class Stella smooch and also this prototype for the glitched which went on to win nine year student prize the final version which Jenny also contributed arts who looks like this and I'm just showing this one as an example of how these one-week prototypes can become a platform that the students can use to build a bigger releasable project either as part of their degree or after the graduate the class is also a great place to try out ideas that they might not be room for in the context of a traditional class format nina freeman made this prototype for Schiphol a game where the player is given control of Nina's mouse cursor and embodied in her autobiographical experience that game went on to look like this when it was finished and released and it won the IGF nuovo prize and was nominated for two Choice Awards as well our class at RMIT

Matthew woods made a mall cop simulator where you watch AI controlled customers on the various screens to report on shoplifters if you could catch them this game I think is a great example of how really technically proficient students can make pretty ambitious substantial progress in prototypes in just seven days Joanna Tran honed her 3d art skills and ended up making a series of narrative personal vignettes games including these - road trip and do you remember and over the whole semester Joanna was working out a framework in which to place her visual art and so it was really exciting to see her start to work out her own personal take on vignette games what that might mean for her in fact partly because of social media and that hashtag and Joanna tweeting to that hashtag some local Melbourne curators

picked up on Joanna's work and invited her to talk about her work to an audience of over 200 people at prestigious Australian showcase FreePlay parallels and so Anna ended up presenting two of her game a week prototypes alongside some of Australia's most famous game developers like literally two weeks after the semester had ended which is fantastic looking beyond the games to come in at the class it's it's also really warmly received by students it's always oversubscribed the evaluations are consistently really positive here's a couple of pull quotes from there NYU end RMIT student evaluations and the vibe in the classroom is really is really positive students find joy in this kind of ultra small scope work particularly as they get faster and the technical challenges of making prototypes starts to fade into the background it's important to mention as well this isn't just a format that works for the most ultra talented students all the students who take it see it as valuable and enjoyable as a

class format and they think that it improves the quality of their work and gives them a sort of a taste of enjoying making games okay so to wrap up some recommendations and an acknowledgement of some challenges that teaching in this format so I'm personally really happy about how a game a week has been working out at least at RMIT but our students still struggle with semester long projects and their other classes so I think it's important to make sure your curriculum deals with that kind of project management production skills even before a final year capstone project classes so topping up and pairing game a week with also does longer planning skills classes so the pace of gaming week is probably too fast for students who are still teaching themselves unity or 3d modeling or something for the first time so I think it's really important that students who take this class be able to get far enough each week so that you can actually have something to say and critically discuss with them beyond basic like how to use software

questions and as I mentioned earlier a game a week is one of multiple options for us that the second-year students can take and I would not want to make this kind of class mandatory it's important to let students know beforehand how intense this class will be and let them take it only if they if they really feel ready the class really is a balancing act between applying the right amount of pressure and incentives and on the other hand looking after the students with regard to burnout for me that has meant constantly emphasizing that failures are okay and not punishing people for weaker submissions and expressing that both verbally every week but also through the structure of the class for example we both give feedback verbally one-on-one so there's no implicit shaming involved in that that's involved in public critique I alternate between using

strict's highly specified constraints like make a game with one button and vague inspirational themes so there's some creative breathing room on on alternate weeks and I think it's important to push the students but you can take it too far game and week can become very stressful especially at the end of the semester as people's final projects in other classes start to ramp up and it's really useful to structure in some way for them to opt out if the if the schedule is really bad so wrapping up really quickly them and then we'll be done so the most important thing we want emphasize is that a game a week as a formal class structure is more than just learning how to work fast and scope properly first I think game a week as a class is also about taste making whether that's through explicit lectures about precedents for the week's theme like Michael and I do or through weekly personal feedback from the instructor and I think the sheer volume of games made and game a week facilitates that

kind of a taste evolution a huge part of becoming a successful professional artist is learning to take your own work seriously and hold yourself to a professional standard and I think one of the nicest things about this class is that it offers students a chance to be recognized as peers by the teacher and by the other students but I think most importantly in their own eyes the class doesn't work as well without a sense of high occasion when the weekly themes are revealed so if anybody wants to run a similar class I would really strongly suggest using a similar ritualization of the theme presentations to give the students that sense of occasion and an extra boost of motivation and finally of course one of the main reasons to run a class like this is the same as the reason to do it in your own creative practice outside of school which is that by building a very large number of projects you have a chance to identify and really hone your

own creative identity and explore different expressions of that identity and that's really about it we have one minute left so probably not enough time for questions we do however we've linked our syllabi publicly mine's annotated and my syllabus also includes a Michael and i's weekly extensive theme note so please feel free to take a look at those and I'm finding and I are both by super happy to answer questions whether that's by email or in person out in the hall after this talk that's about yeah yeah thank you so much very much [Applause]