Hack, Slash & Backstab: A Post-Mortem of University Game Development at Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes the educational, operational, and practical implementation of an upper-division undergraduate studio-style course centered on the subject of game production. Specifically, the article addresses the course organization and processes, the institutional context for the course (i.e., its situated role in the larger curriculum), the overall structure of the course both from a pedagogical and operational point of view, and concludes with substantial reflection and analysis by the authors on what worked effectively and where improvements could be made. The article also provides substantial depth regarding the student experience, the structure of creating muti-disciplinary software development teams within the course, orienting the course around the successful production of a professional-grade XBOX One video game product, and various methods, structures and tools for course organization, communication, software development practice, documentation, etc. This in turn is framed in the larger context of the course as it was offered not only through an academic department, but in parallel with a campus-based games studio and research center. Numerous detailed elements are provided in such fashion as to provide other educators and mentors a relevant, structured, and detailed post-mortem of a large scale, multi-disciplinary effort that engaged students in complex multimedia software production in a professional context. In addition, several elements atypical from more traditional software project courses as they intersect game development including entertainment design, playtesting, marketing, press, public demonstration and performance, audience reception and analytics, commercial platform, etc., and discussed and analyzed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".