motivating and evaluating game development capstone projects
Designing an effective capstone course can be a challenge, particularly at a university on the quarter system. The capstone course is generally an integrative experience, designed to help students pull together skills they have learned throughout their college careers. Determining how to effectively evaluate the work that students do in a capstone course is a difficult task, particularly when the capstone is in a game development program. There are many measures of the quality of a game, some of which are less important in a curriculum focused on programming and production. Here we propose a set of metrics tailored to a game development capstone course. We consider two main metrics: technology metrics that focus the integration of standard, specific game technologies and design metrics that consider how well the implementation matches the game design at different stages of development. We also discuss several factors that we believe have contributed to success in the game development capstone course, including industry involvement as a student motivator and the use of XNA in the curriculum.
capstone computer game development