Three Approaches Towards Teaching Game Production

Teaching game production benefits computer science and engineering students, because game applications are usually complex interactive real-time systems, which are non-trivial to implement. Moreover, game production has a multi-disciplinary nature, because — in addition to software development — a game production process can include areas such as commercialization issues, game design, graphics design and implementation, sound engineering, level design, and story design. This kind of project environment teaches the development team to work and communicate efficiently. Having organized a variety of game production project courses in the Department of Information Technology in the University of Turku the students have implemented complete computer games or game proto-types. Our focus has been on teaching game related algorithms, software technologies and software engineering aspects of game production. We have used three different teaching approaches to organize the courses: (1) the traditional home assignment model where the students take full responsibility of organizing the production, (2) research seminars where the teachers act as direct customers for the production, and (3) intensive courses where the teachers participate in the production as coaches and mentors. In this presentation, we describe the three different teaching approaches, present them as formal process models, and compare them to commercial game production processes. Additionally, we consider the multi-disciplinary nature of game production and discuss how the issue can be taken into consideration in a study environment where the students are mainly technology oriented.