CTE Capstone: Game Development

Overview

Creating and ublishing a game is a long, arduous, creative, frustrating process that requires many skills, not the least of which is to work in a diversely team, with people having and learning many skills and talents. This process of game development and publishing lends itself well to the rigorous requirements of a high school capstone project. Laid out below are the requirements for your game project to be accepted as meeting all capstone rigors.

What needs to be done for your project work to become and be credited as a 'Capstone' project:

The Pitch

• All team members seeking capstone credit must be a substantial part of the inital verbal pitch, and contribute materially to the project's planning.
• The project pitch is formal, and must included both team recruitment elements, and elements for possbile marketing and investment.

Your Blog

• Each member seeking capstone credit must keep their own blog.
• The blog must be weekly (at minimum), semi-weekly, or daily.
• Blog must contain all regular math requiremnts, and meet those requirements fully. (see here)
• Blog entries must be thorough, complete, and descriptive, with few typos, and proper spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation.
• Be sure and document within your blog when you acquire any new skills, or demonstrate a significant advancement in any existing skill.

The Design Documentation

• Each capstone member must take a significant part in the creation of the project planning document,
• Artists: In creating a complete, usable look and feel style guide.
• Designers: For the gameplay and story document itself.
• Programmers: In creating a complete, descriptive, and usable code style and practice guide.
• All capstone members will need to adhere to the various style guides and show professionality in updating and maintaining the documents.

The Organizational Document

• Each capstone member must take responsibility to accurately and diligently use and maintain any organizational documents (e.g. Kanban, Scrumm, Sprint)
• As part of the orginizational document a schedule must be prepared and followed as closely as is possible, with clear details when the schedule can not be met.
• The schedule should contain at least 3 milestones with clear, detailed goals for these milestones.

Review

• At each schedule milestone (see above) the team should seek review and feedback from both the studio exec (Instructor) and from others in the game industry, as available.
• Previous to each milestone, the team should seek feedback from peers and individuals from the project's target audience.

The Team

As you all know, making a game is a team effort, and all those seeking capstone credit must demonstrate they can work productively and professionally within a team structure.

Your portfolio

• Creation of a professional portfolio is a requirement of capstone credit.
• This portfolio will be tailored for either job seeking, or college admission, or both.
• The portfolio must be complete, thorough, and professional.
• The product/project must be a significant part of this portfolio, although the portfolio will likely contain more than your project.
• Links to signiicant portions of your process blog should be included with the portfolio.

Publish, Present, or Both

• The primary goal will be to publish a product in an industry publishing platform with quality gate-keeping (e.g. Steam, Apple App Store).
• Instead of this, capstone seekers may opt to present their product in a public forum (art gallery/show), or to an industry panel.
• Capstone seekers may opt for both of these options.
• Persuing a NASA HUNCH project and attending each review meets this requirement.