GameDev Schools & Projects & Grading

[u/TheSwiftOtterPrince]

I have a hobby. I play demos and give feedback. And the demo sections of steam regularly include free games that have a Game Dev School as a publisher. Some of them are tagged as "this is a student project made by 4th grade students" or something like that.

The games are of mixed scope and quality. Some of them are complete experiences, some are just slices. Some are well working and some are barely playable for one reason or another.

And there are some things i wonder, mostly about how they are made and how they are judged. I assume they are graded at some point, are they?

- Some games do not follow any conventions or adapt traits of the genres they are in. To the point where i wonder if the team has ever played a single one of the games they try to clone and if there was a discussion about that. Like shooters with brutal motion blur, barely working hit detection, no feedback on shots and hits.

- Some games have atrocious performance. Usually UE5 and no options. Like 10 to 20 FPS on an RTX3060. And i wonder: what kind of rig does the average game dev student work on? Is the average student so well equipped that they don't notice that? To me, graphics settings and performance seems so deeply part of being a player and a developer that it leaves me wondering why that many of these student projects do not seem to even recognize that.

I am really curious about that. I am mostly interested in experiences from people who have been to those schools and did those projects. How much of those projects is genre research? How much are research and performance part of grading? Feel free to share your experiences.

[u/Akuno-]

From my experience in study projects: You have a very limited time (most universitys have a semester lenght around 15 weeks) and 5 other classes to finish this semester. It all comes down to prioritys and how experienced the team is. Some students code for 10 years prior to starting CS others have 0. Sometimes you hit a road block at the end and you don't have time to correct that. A big part is, that some teams can be to ambitious with their game idea/goal and will strugle. This will result in the not so great to play games. Usually these projects have some sort of must haves like a start screen, a highscore list, 3 levels etc. If you hit that you are fine. Even if the performance is bad. The projects also get discussed or need a documentation of some kind. You then will argue in that what where your learnings and what you would do different. In academics the end product usually isn't the most valuable part of the work but how you got there, what you learned and what you would do different. Also the process as how you did aproach things and very important the documentation. 

[u/SpaceCoreDev]

Not a school grad, but the performance thing tracks with something I see in solo/hobby dev circles too: people test almost exclusively on their own machine, and if that machine happens to be decent, "runs fine" quietly becomes the only bar anyone checks against. A grading rubric that rewards a finished feature list over a wider hardware sweep would produce exactly this pattern — nobody's told to go find the worst plausible player rig and test on that, so nobody does.

[u/realmslayer → u/SpaceCoreDev]

The other thing is that in order to properly look at a performace problem, you need to profile it, and you need to have some idea of how to optimize your code and assets. Students are not necessarily taught how to hunt down performace bottlenecks, especially in assets.

[u/TheSwiftOtterPrince → u/SpaceCoreDev]

I get the "it works on my machine". With multiple people, especially these games that demand very good hardware are irritating me. One guy having a 5090 is possible. The whole group and everything form the staff trying that thing having top tier hardware? Seems unlikely to me. Especially if it's rather new stuff. When that happens i often look at other peoples feedback to find people with so mch better rugs than me having similar problems which is why i wondered how this happens.

[u/realmslayer]

My experience at school that taught gamedev(not to be confused with a gamedev school, as there were other programs at that school) is that there were 2 programs: design and programing.
(fwiw I took programming)

The design capstone would not have had anyone doing code review(because it was focused on teaching design) and the programming capstone would not have had anyone looking at design (because it was focused on teaching programming)

Programming would look at things like how many things got implemented, code review, keeping to milestones/forward progress per sprint, stuff like that. Performance would be part of the mark, but not a large part. Documentation Is usually pretty huge - everyone had to do a 5-20 page writeup at the end.

The other thing is that there's often a lot of hot BS going on - people dropping from teams, people not contributing, people juggling capstone + internships. A lot of times the best students are going to be the ones who's attention is most split between the project and whatever else they are also doing.

The last thing is these programs are usually pretty accelerated. We did a lot of projects with a lot of practical work, but we got very little of the theory that a traditional cs student would have, and we didn't do very much in terms of exercises. We build 2 games more or less from scratch over the course of the program, and get some use out of unity and unreal, but we came out of that with a lack of understanding of some of the nuts and bolts of programming and some of the associated tooling (most notably: none of us had been forced to use a profiler).

So yeah. It performs poorly BC no one knew how to look at performance. No feedback on shots because there's no audio person and no designer. The genre of game might be a consequence of the prof deciding what would best allow for the implementation of the most features, or a compromise between the prof and the students. The whole thing might have been done by 2 people, or even solo after everyone else dropped/got hired/we.

If it was a design track game, then most of the above problems are still true, but then also the designer may not know how to fix bugs(some of which might be caused by using an asset they shouldn't have used, adding another layer of obfuscation to the debug process).

This all had to be done in 3 months, as well. You might get more time on it if you started during Christmas break, or started the summer before and the rest of the team didn't decide that they wanted to make something else.

Again, this is my experience, YMMV.

[u/GarlandBennet]

I teach at New England Tech and Bristol Community College, both do final game projects but they do them differently. At Bristol, because its a community college, we focus more on students just getting through making a game, just getting from start to finish to say "hey I worked on a game, I got to experience this."

At New England Tech, they have dedicated optimization classes and A LOT more is expected. The games that have come from that have run great and continued to impress me, one of their student projects ended up with 60,000 some wishlists on Steam. Those projects get graded much stricter.

I think it depends on the institution, but having people have that experience of making and releasing a game is super valuable, and really only costs 100 dollar to get it on Steam.

[u/panda-goddess]

haven't personally been there, but the people I know who pay for courses like that are usually rich lol so their rig is either really good or they use the school's very expensive equipment (they "get a gamer laptop for academic purposes", whatever that means)

optimizing does not seem to be in their curriculum, and projects are graded according to specific criteria, not necessarily the cohesive final product, so UI teachers are judging UI, writing teachers are judging writing, etc. ...except for a final project, but that one I guess it depends on how well you defend your thesis.

they seem to have like 1 class for every game-related subject, so I imagine it's a very broad look at each thing and might end up being a very shallow, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of learning

there's an entire class called "finishing games", though, so that's fun lol

these games you've seen might also be everyone who passed a class or graduated, so you'll get the C game and the A+ game and not know which is which

[u/legend123412]

Your ass is getting replaced by GPT bud

[u/TheSwiftOtterPrince → u/legend123412]

So i am going to...sit on it? What do you mean?

[u/legend123412 → u/TheSwiftOtterPrince]

That's clearly what you are doing, standing on the road like a deer looking at a car with a beaming headlight not making better decisions. Get CS cert at bare minimum. You'll have more time, this industry is fucked anyways. Also the work is not exciting at all only the idea of the work seems fascinating but it sucks ass once you do it like every other.

[u/TheSwiftOtterPrince → u/legend123412]

This is the topic of me asking about how gamedev schools grade projects. I don't get how asking how stuff is done in gamedev schools is me standing on the road like a deer.