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Postmortem on a Student Project
Gamasutra continues to expand their coverage of student game design programs, with a postmortem on the student project Insignia. A group of six students spent most of a year working on an RPG/RTS hybrid using the d20 license from Wizards of the Coast. From the entertaining writeup: "The process of pitching our idea was highly informative and gave us an industry perspective, insight and positive feedback from the judges. The pressure of competition also helped really focus the team's efforts rather than the more nebulous approach of most student projects."
Probably the most valuable lesson to be learned from this is that the nebulous approach never really gets a person anywhere. No matter what the industry, it's all about follow-through. How many folks out there started writing/coding/desinging the perfect game? How many folks still have a stack of notes out there in a closet somewhere, under a stack of 5.25 floppies, that would have been a great novel, or the next Freecraft?
Which brings me to my next question, can schools teach follow-through, or is that something innate?
(And on a related note, if schools figure out how to teach follow-through, will we see some "entertainment" that's better than mass produced game sequels, reality television, or yet-another-AD&D knockoffs we have now?)
(Or is the internet living proof that there really is nothing new under the sun?)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
From The Article: > It would have been easy to get lost in the development process and let production slip away from us if we hadn't addressed our priorities at the very beginning and throughout the academic year. So for every production decision we made, we asked 'is this going to get us higher marks at the end of the year?' and if the answer to that question was 'no' then we didn't focus on it.
It sounds like the learned the most important lesson in any large project!
> We ran into institutional barriers within the University, with the IT department loathe to install certain software and vehemently opposed to giving us access rights to install it ourselves. We often found that they did a bad job and did not test the software they installed, leaving us to wait for a week or two before they would come down and try to fix the problems.
And ... the second most important lesson too!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
The industry isn't lacking creativity at all. The publishers are. There are literally hundreds of cool minigames sitting around at dev houses gathering dust for 2 reasons:
1) neither the dev house management nor the publisher will risk their reputation publishing an unpolished game.
2) the publishers won't risk their money funding the polish on a new game design.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking