Game studio simulator: Integrating industry practice and formative individual assessment in collaborative game development capstone projects

Capstone courses, where students work on a large group project at the end of their degree, are common in computing. Many accreditation and industry bodies explicitly require or recommend them. Over the past two decades, capstone courses specifically focused on game development have become increasingly popular. Game development offers students the opportunity to express themselves creatively and learn to work with people from a variety of disciplines such as programming, design, music, and art. In this paper we present the results of 10 years of iteration on a game development capstone course. This course is structured as a year-long collaboration between software engineering and game design students, but maintains separation between the disciplines in terms of supervision and assessment. Based on our experiments and observations, we provide recommendations for teaching practices, team structure, project timeline, and assessment. In these, we focus on emulating and incorporating industry practices, maximising opportunities for formative feedback, and maintaining authentic individual assessment. We have found that our most recent implementation has resulted in improved student satisfaction and learning outcomes compared to previous iterations.