But Worse: Remaking Famous Games on a Budget as a Game Development Course

As more and more higher education students become interested in pursuing careers in the game industry, it becomes vital that the teaching process aims to replicate the requirements and needs that future employers would pose. In addition to directly transitioning to larger companies, many students choose to stay as independent developers. To cover both cases, a new outlook is needed in game development courses that focus on multiple parts of the programming process – idea generation, design, implementation, testing and documentation. In addition to this, students need to be shown that continuous experimentation and building out their ideas is a normal process, even when the initial results
may not be of the highest quality. To combat these potential mental blocks and create a more structured development and teaching process, a new course is created for up-and-coming students at Aalborg University, which focuses on remaking parts of widely known games in a self-imposed limited time and
resource budget, which is documented, with the specific idea that the final product will be worse than the archetype, but the learnt experiences will be useful. It is demonstrated that students responded favourably to the course structure and were engaged throughout. Initial metrics from the self-reported
time and resource budgeting also show that the students have gotten a good grasp on the different development parts. On average the student has taken between 15 and 20 hours of development time to create their mini-projects, with 7 different genres represented