UGD Devsign Track

September 2023 - June 2025

What is it?

The UGD Devsign Track is the game design/development education program organized by the UChicago Game Design Club (UGD). This program meets weekly on Sundays from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm to teach students how to design and develop board and video games.

Each meeting begins with a 10-30 minute presentation by one of the 3 UGD board members in charge of the program. Following this presentation, the program participants have the remaining time to work on their games in small teams of 3 to 5 students. As the teams work, the UGD board members will check in regularly to ensure they are on the right track and avoid common pitfalls. 

The program is divided into two smaller programs: the Design Track and the Development Track. The Design Track takes place in Fall Quarter and is a more structured program with specific goals each week that aims to teach students how to design games. The Development Track takes place during Winter and Spring Quarters and is a somewhat less structured program without weekly goals that aims to teach students how to develop games. 

At the ends of Fall Quarter and Spring Quarter, UGD hosts large showcase events open to the entire school where students outside the program, professors, and anyone else can playtest projects students worked on both inside and outside the Devsign Track. These events have been highly successful, always showcasing 7+ games, at least 3 of which were produced in the Devsign Track, to 25+ students and various professors.

Fall 2024 Showcase Pictures

Why create this program?

I decided to design this program from scratch in September 2023 along with 2 friends, Katherine Waterman and Nicole Stachowiak, after seeing the many problems with UGD's previous attempts to support students with developing games.

When I joined UGD in Fall 2021, the Development Track was a very primitive program where students would pitch game ideas to the club at the start of the year, then get sorted onto teams with students interested in the game pitch, and then the teams were left entirely on their own to make games. The teams were expected to showcase games at the end of every quarter despite not receiving any support whatsoever once their teams were made. 

As a result of this lack of support, many students felt very lost and didn't know how to properly develop their games. By the end of Fall quarter, all but 3 teams had disbanded as they were making little to no progress. By the end of Spring quarter, the remaining teams also disbanded because they fell for common game development pitfalls such as scope creep. Clearly, this version of the program was not sufficient, so some changes had to be made to better prepare students to develop their own games.

In Fall 2022, UGD attempted to rework the Development Track by starting it in the Winter instead of the Fall and by creating a new program, the Design Track, during the Fall which would introduce students to game development in a more hands-on way. This program met on Sundays from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm and tasked students with working in teams of 4-7 to create a clone of a classic arcade game using the Unity game engine and then to modify this clone. To help the students out, a more-experienced UGD board member was placed on each team to help the students program their games. 

Unfortunately, this program was a resounding failure. First-year students with little programming or game development experience struggled tremendously with programming a game in Unity, a tool that the majority of students had never used before. So much time was spent on programming and learning Unity that the students completely neglected design. As a result of this lack of design focus, when the Development Track started again in the Winter, the students made the same mistakes, and all teams disbanded by the end of Winter quarter with no notable results. The final nail in the coffin was that putting all of the responsibility to teach the teams on the one board member on each team led to very disjointed experiences where each team would be lacking significantly in many areas. For example, as I am an experienced programmer, my team spent nearly all of its time programming, and art, music, and design were neglected entirely. Some teams that were led by UGD board members who lacked programming experience struggled substantially to produce anything playable and received scathing reviews from students as a result. 

This drastic failure showed us that the direction of this program was far from correct. We learned that we needed to focus more on design and give students the opportunity to learn from all of us, not just one board member per team.

The 2023-2024 Devsign Track

The Fall 2023 Design Track program prepares students to develop games by focusing entirely on design over development. From a practical standpoint, this means that the goal of the program is for students to create analog prototypes of digital or analog games. In other words, in the Design Track, students can design whatever types of games they want, including both board games and video games, but they are only allowed to use physical prototyping methods, so programming is not permitted. 

This restriction is very beneficial as it requires students only to use faster prototyping methods, which in turn causes students to complete iterations of the Iterative Design Process substantially faster, therefore giving students more opportunities to learn about design. This restriction also notably enables students to create a playable prototype of their games by the end of Fall quarter, something that was not possible when creating digital prototypes in the earlier renditions of the Design Track. 

The other significant change we introduced to the Design Track is the addition of weekly lecture presentations that teach some theory behind game design and provide students with specific tasks to work on each week. These presentations allow all UGD board members in charge of the Devsign Track to contribute to each student's education, so students are no longer limited by one person's perspective. Also, they ensure that students are correctly learning everything they need to create their own games. Lastly, the weekly goals motivate students to spend their time productively and work actively on their games.

As a result of these changes, the Fall 2023 Design Track was a resounding success! Over 30 students designed their first games and produced playable prototypes by the end of the quarter.

After the Fall 2023 Design Track ended, we started the Winter/Spring 2024 Development Track and structured it the same as the Fall 2021 Development Track, meaning we let students pitch game ideas, sorted them onto teams, and let them work on their own to produce a digital prototype by the end of Spring quarter. Although the students were better prepared and all the teams lasted through the Winter, this program was still a huge failure as the lack of consistent meeting times and support caused students to lose motivation to work on their games. Slowly yet surely, team members stopped showing up, and progress came to a slow, steady halt. 

This showed us that, although the Design Track was clearly helpful,  it was not enough on its own to support students with game development. We needed some additional program similar to the Design Track to teach students already familiar with design how to develop games.

Spring 2023 Design Track Prototype Example

Where does the Devsign Track curriculum come from?

As UChicago students, we care deeply about education, so we strongly oppose teaching students made-up information. Because of this, we made sure that all the information taught in our program, especially the design theory, came from reliable and verifiable sources.

Some sources for material in our presentations for the 2023 and 2024 Devsign Track include:

• UChicago courses

  • MADD 22322: Introduction to Game Design

  • CMSC 20300: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction

  • CMSC 20900: Computers for Learning

  • CMSC 22000: Introduction to Software Development

  • CMSC 23700: Introduction to Computer Graphics

  • Many more courses, particularly those in the Media Art and Design (MADD) department

• Textbooks

  • The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell

  • Fundamentals of Game Design (4th Edition) by Ernest Adams

  • A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster

  • Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Katie Salen Tekinbas and Eric Zimmerman

• The Unity documentation and various online Unity tutorial websites, as cited throughout the Unity Carnival

• Personal experiences from internships at companies including Google, IBM, Riot Games, and more

  • All information obtained from personal experiences was framed as such and was not presented as undeniable truths

The 2024-2025 Devsign Track

As the 2023 Design Track was so successful, we opted not to make many significant changes, but to instead iron out some of the small issues we faced. Some improvements we added to the 2024 Design Track were:

• Adding an icebreaker activity in the first meeting to facilitate team formation as opposed to using a Google form before the program started

• Using a unified presentation theme with more professional and consistent presentations

• Assigning UGD board members to be loosely in charge of each team to ensure there is someone always checking in on every team and to give each team an easy point of contact if they needed help

  • Note that all UGD board members involve with the Design Track still helped out every team, this change was just to ensure that no teams slipped under the cracks, as some teams in the previous year did not interact with us at all and made their games entirely on their own

To fix the Development track, we redesigned the 2025 Development Track from scratch to use a similar format to the Design Track, meaning the Development Track would meet weekly for 2 hours on Sundays and each meeting would begin with a short presentation and then would give students time to work on their games in small teams of 3-5 students. 

To prepare students to develop video games, we hosted a Unity education workshop called the Unity Carnival. For this workshop, we prepared over 100+ pages of interactive Unity challenges to introduce various features of the Unity game engine. Please read the linked page to learn more about this workshop and to see these challenges for yourself!

The biggest difference between the Design Track and the Development Track is that, unlike the Design Track where all prototypes are analog prototypes of a similar nature, the prototypes in the Development Track differ drastically between teams due to differing requirements of their games. For example, a team working on an action roguelike game would need to spend lots of time prototyping real-time combat mechanics, while a team working on a narrative-driven game would instead need to prototype their interactive story. These differing prototypes necessitate different development timelines for each team, so it is not possible for us to assign the same weekly goals for all teams in the Development Track as we did in the Design Track. Instead of assigning weekly goals, we checked in with teams and pushed them towards creating a "Vertical Slice" prototype (i.e. a prototype that includes primitive, un-fleshed-out versions of all aspects of their game) by the end of Spring quarter.

This Development Track was very successful, as all of the Design Track teams stayed through the rest of the year for the Development Track and successfully produced prototypes of their games! 

Still, it was not entirely perfect. Particularly, attendance started to dwindle a bit, and some students didn't spend their meeting time productively at the end of Winter quarter and at the start of Spring quarter. When the final presentation was only a couple of weeks away, students returned and resumed hard work to finish their prototypes. This suggests that the Development Track needs an additional milestone at the end of Winter quarter to maintain engagement throughout the whole year.

2024-2025 Devsign Track Presentation Examples