As you guys know, until mid-May 2024, this project is carried out as an MSc final project, so there are a few constraints, starting with the one-man team and going down to having to satisfy the faculty’s requests. So, this week’s development round suffered from an unplanned assignment, and a lot of the time planned for advancing ended up being spent preparing a PowerPoint presentation instead.
My project backlog was tuned to the official module structure discussed last semester, and it made sense and adhered to the module description. We were supposed to submit an alpha of the game on Week 6, and the next submission for both the final artefact and the Game Design Document was set at the end of the year. So, based on that plan, I could focus on the project full-time with no interruptions. There was also 1 hour a week of 1 to 1 with the project supervisor to catch up and discuss the project status. That made perfect sense.
But here’s the genius idea that the faculty came up with: let’s change plans now and have assignments on weeks 2, 4, 8, 12, and 14 with PowerPoint presentations (10-15 minutes max) and each to be graded. Also, let’s not have the 1 to 1 one-hour supervision, but let’s replace it with a two-hour seminar with two supervisors and a group of 4 students each presenting.
This means that we invest 2 hours instead of 1, but it is to be split into 4, so each student has less supervisory time than what was supposed to have and is constrained and dispersed in talking about three different projects. Genius, right? Less time available, more dispersive supervision, and time to be allocated to a bunch of unplanned PowerPoint assignments, each quite time-consuming. Basically, the productive work on the project is taking a serious hit.
Naturally, in a 10-minute presentation plus Q&A, there is no way one can present all the work that has been done, so I’m really missing the whole point the faculty tried to make with this “module improvement”. My guess? They no longer have the personnel to execute the module as approved and published in the module descriptor, so they had to adapt it, hurting not only the final project in the process but also putting at risk the module learning objectives.
Now, brace yourselves, as I left the last module change, the cherry on top, for this last paragraph. The approved module descriptor doesn’t really plan for a research thesis at all! This is what is expected in the final write-up:
In accordance with DkIT Academic Regulations for Masters (Taught and Structured) Research Projects policy, students are expected to produce an e-portfolio which includes detailed design documentation of 10,000 words.
So I planned accordingly to submit a Game Design Document, which is usually about 40,000 words, but I can keep it smaller for them as I did in the first year 3D Art and Software Engineering joint assessment; my GDD was just 19,000 words.
But no… we do have to produce a GDD, yes, but also a Research Thesis! So, there is less time for the actual final project due to the unplanned assignments, but also a 10,000-word research thesis that was not part of the module descriptor in the first place! This implies that the final module becomes more separated from the Industry, not allowing the planned production of a “prototype solution of a quality to be suitable to be shown to a publisher/festival” (from the Module Descriptor), but we now must reduce the quality of this product by a lot to allocate the necessary time to write an academic research thesis, never planned at all as part of this Master. And all in the 24 hours per week (as per Module Descriptor).
Anyhow, I plan to stick as much as possible to the original module descriptor because I want to get to a good game beta with my industry partner, DFT Games Studios.