Final Game Design

This will be turned in as a pdf on Gradescope.

This document is similar to your basic game design document with two major changes. First, you need to write this as a single, cohesive document, not as if you pieced together three entirely separate assignments. Second, many more elements are added based on topics we covered after your basic game design document was due.

As with the basic game design, the purpose of this document is to describe the game well and describe how your knowledge of the elements of game design in this course were used to influence the design of your game. Most answers, especially those in the middle, should be several paragraphs, not just a few sentences. All ideas should be well beyond the brainstorming phase and into the design phase, at a point where, if we had the time, we would implement it. So make sure that you are not just tossing ideas out for each of these elements - you are fully describing what you would want to implement.

Abstract: Describe the learning goals of your game, the premise, and the overall game design in just a few paragraphs.

Describe the area, general age group, and skills you are going to teach your user. Make sure that these are skills, not just content. These need to be specific - not just "math" or "memorization" - exactly which math skills are expected or exactly what level of memorization is expected to be built? You also need the skills to show some range from easier to harder.

Learning Trajectory: create a hypothetical learning trajectory for how student skills / knowledge will be built. The left edge should be the skills you assume students start with (lower anchor points). The right edge are the most advanced skills you will teach (upper anchor points). If there are concrete skills in the middle, you can highlight those with a different color. If you think it is more appropriate to split this into multiple trajectories, you can do so. Where available, cite sources for either the learning goals themselves or the relationships between learning goals. Much of what you are teaching has research behind it, so you should not be making all of it up.

Game Design: Describe your game, taking care to describe the different elements such as premise, rules, etc. This needs to be a complete description that will allow the reader to understand the game play.

Skill Building: Describe how the game gets more challenging as users learn skills, using vocabulary from game design.

Badge System: Describe a badge system that could be integrated into your game. Take care to describe three categories of badges. Make sure that your badges are tailored to your game. I can make a generic badge system that could be used for every one of your games. The purpose of this is to think about how to make them uniquely designed for your game:

Motivation: Describe what elements you included to engage the player, again using vocabulary from game design. Describe how different "player types" will find something that engages them.

Designing for the User: Include the user profiles. Explain how you took into account the limitations in skills of the user to influence your game design.

Culturally-relevant Instruction: Explain how you designed the game to appeal to students whose cultures do not fall into dominant American culture. What specific game elements did this affect, and in what way does that follow strategies we learned about culturally-relevant instruction?

UDL: How would you incorporate universal design for learning to accommodate students with sight impairments, hearing impairments, and/or cognitive impairments?

Intelligent Systems: How could an intelligent system be used in your system to adjust game play based on user play? Hypothesize a design that would dynamically provide personalized feedback and choose the next level / task / etc.