Neomancer: An Exercise in Interdisciplinary Academic Game Development

The paper presents Neomancer, an interdisciplinary academic game development project that brought together roughly 50 participants from the University of Western Ontario and Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, with a lead designer based in Seattle. The project's purpose is to give students a realistic, large-scale game development experience by pooling complementary strengths: Western's programming and software expertise and Seneca's artistic and design capabilities. Neomancer is an action-adventure role-playing game built on Epic's Unreal engine, set in the fantasy archipelago of Kintorr, and sized to be comparable to a commercial title in its genre. The project began in fall 2004 with a planned two to three year timeline, and the authors report that its first two milestones were met.

The authors draw a set of lessons from the first months of work. They conclude that interdisciplinary teams are essential to reflect industry reality, and that consistent leadership, regular communication, and a single clear creative vision are critical, particularly when team members are geographically dispersed. They also find that academic workloads must be scaled realistically, since students carry other courses and cannot treat the project as full-time work. Additional findings include the value of student team leaders with creative control, the difficulty students face when requirements change in a manner that conflicts with the waterfall model they are used to, the scarcity of quality reference materials for the Unreal environment, and the need to tie grades to project deliverables so they are not sacrificed during crunch periods.

The evidence base is qualitative and experiential, drawn from the authors' observations and informal surveys of students, which the authors describe as favorable. No formal survey sample size or structured methodology is reported. The paper is a progress report rather than a completed evaluation, and its conclusions are provisional, pending the project's completion.