About — Student Game Development
After my semester studying abroad in Montreal, developing games in both a professional and student setting, I will be entering my final year of college and will be working on ‘the most professional’ student project of my college career. Knowing that I will be writing blogs during the development cycle of the project, I thought this would be the best time to reflect on my time as a student game developer, as well as the problems with student game development.
The thing with student game developers is, as the title implies, it is about doing a game project for school. When I was looking for an internship around the time I went to the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS) 2016, I remember hearing the advice, ‘it’s best not to say that the student games you have worked on have been student projects.’ Now, to be fair, although student projects are innately less professional, due to the setting, they do offer some semblance of industry experience. That being said, it is not a surprise to me that student game developers are looked down on. We have a much more restricted time frame, and mindset, compared to projects that survive out in the real world.
Time is valuable, especially for students who are managing busy academic and social lives. For student game projects, this only gets more complicated as everyone has their own schedule and time commitments. In a studio setting, there is an obligation and commitment that developers must work toward. This results in school development teams committing less time to the project, as a result of the school system incentivizing them to get good grades.
This time management restriction isn’t too bad, but because of the incentivization of getting a high GPA, the main goal for students isn’t to create a game, but to create a game that simply passes. This enables students to work on assignments for other classes, which is emphasized when teachers believe that their subject is what the student should be focusing on. When you have multiple teachers who expect a more thorough level of work from their students, it takes time away from working on the game project. This mentality that universities may inadvertently generate does not provide the best preparation for working in the gaming industry. But they do have a saving grace, and although the school system would like me to say that it provides a ‘safe environment to fail,’ the idea doesn’t compensate for the shortcomings of a student project. Instead, these restrictions help the student learn to deal and to take into account these tricky limitations that all game developers meet.
Ironically, this has never been a problem for me. My current title of student game developer implies that I am creating games for school, although in my experience, I have never made a game specifically for a class. I am interested in games and interactivity, and when I made those ‘student games,’ my mind was not on my grade for the class; for me it has always been about how to make the game or some aspect of the game better. It’s not that I ignore the restrictions, it’s just that I manage my time in a way that gives me a lot of free time to work on what I want (and still receive good grades).
The problem of student game developers isn’t the school system, it’s the mindset and compliancy the school system breeds, along with the expectation of success for the project, or success for a grade. Students need to realize that the limitations school provides stops them from creating a well-polished industry title, and instead focus on creating well-polished vertical slices, or minimum viable products. What I have learned as a student game developer is that I need to scale back the AAA game that I want to make, and manage my time more effectively, to create the core elements of that experience.
