• [Draft, and will be finalized at beginning of course] Team-based: Projects 55%
• Individual: Reflective Portfolios, Reading/Homework Reflections (JiTTs), Participation & Contribution, Level-Up Quizzes 45%

NOTES:

Welcome to IAT 312. This year, IAT 312 transforms into a vibrant, collaborative agile indie game studio.

In this course, you’ll experience what it’s like to work as part of a real-world professional game studio, designing deeply meaningful, socially enjoyable, and transformative "People Fun" games that engage players at a deeper level. You’ll move beyond simply creating entertaining experiences to crafting games that foster meaningful social connections, thoughtful engagement, and purposeful interactions among players.

There’s no TA this semester, placing creative leadership directly into your hands. Through iterative agile sprints, you'll rapidly prototype and test your ideas in teams, learning how to effectively manage your projects like professionals. You'll regularly give and receive constructive peer feedback, refining your designs to achieve meaningful player experiences.

Instead of overly relying only on traditional numeric grades, this course embraces a reflective, coaching-oriented approach to assessment. You'll regularly reflect on your design process, team collaboration, personal growth, and creative insights, supported through coaching-style dialogues and narrative self-assessments. The goal is genuine growth—not numeric grading stress, although we might need to do regular micro-quizzes given that there won’t be any TA.

You’ll develop skills highly valued by professionals: agile project management, effective communication, reflective practice, collaborative teamwork, and critical thinking—including thoughtful use of AI tools as collaborative thought partners.

By the end of the semester, you’ll have created not only innovative game projects but also professional-quality portfolios showcasing your growth as designers, collaborators, and reflective learners. Together, we'll foster a joyful, supportive studio culture that transforms challenges into authentic opportunities for growth, meaningful creativity, and playful exploration.

No programming or Unity/Unreal knowledge is required. All games created in this course will be or mimick analog/board games (using Tabletop Simulator).

Let's have fun, learn deeply, and create purposeful games that players genuinely love to experience together!

Intended learning outcomes

The course is intended to support you to gain both practical experience with and a critical understanding of the foundations of game design in specific contexts. Specifically, by fulfilling the requirements of the course you will be prepared to accomplish key tasks in 4 main game design areas:

1. Game Design Basics: 
1. Explain and critically reflect on games, and the characteristics and features of different types of games including their components, mechanics & rules, dynamics, and aesthetics/UX/fun, the “Magic Circle”, and what makes for a compelling game 
2. Analyze and argue what makes for a compelling game (or not) and why people like to play games
2. Game Design Frameworks & Psychology
1. Compare and contrast different frameworks and underlying assumptions, and determine how and when to use which frameworks
2. Explain different player types and psychologies, how they affect their gameplay, assumptions, and preferences, and use this knowledge to improve game designs
3. Game Design Process: 
1. Explain and effectively utilize game design best practices/processes/frameworks/mechanics, and explain how you did this when designing several games in teams. This includes typical game design phases such as ideation, prototyping and play testing as the base for an iterative game design cycle 
2. Analyze, discuss, and critique games using appropriate terminology, and provide well-structured, constructive, and useful feedback (e.g., after playtesting or game pitches). 
3. Discuss the difference between game critiques vs. playtesting, and demonstrate why, when, and how to use either of them effectively to improve your game and design process
4. Effectively demonstrate and reflect on how to effectively communicate your game across different stages (from early prototype to final game), to different audiences (both internal and external), and using different presentation formats (incl. written instructions/rule sheets, pitches, game design documents (GDDs), and game videos)
4. Game Design Teams: 
1. Reflect on and apply suitable processes and team-based, collaborative practices used in game design including ideation, prototyping, iterative revisions, and playtesting as the base for an iterative design cycle to a game design project.
1. Specific processes covered in this class may include structured team brainstorming (affinity diagramming), moodboards, inspiration analysis, Razor & Slogan, Play Matrix, playtesting scripts, structured game critique/analysis, and Agile project management)
2. Explain what makes a good game designer, and why and how they often work in teams
3. Reflect on your own and others’ assumptions, lenses, beliefs, what people really care about, and preferences about games/playing, and how do they affect game design and teamwork 
4. Explain and utilize a toolbox of how to  foster a collaborative, constructive, and supportive team culture and process, including patterns of thinking and behaviour that support effective teams, as well as specific  tools, tips, processes and frameworks (incl. Agile) that might be useful
5. Find ways to effectively address challenges that can occur in team-based environments while being respectful and constructive. (This could include collaboratively resolve challenges that commonly occur in team-based projects, such as balancing between leading/following, communication challenges, conflicts that arise, ensuring all team members contribute meaningfully, engaging all team members, ensuring all care for the project and each other, getting people on the same page, and figuring out a shared vision/purpose that all can care about). 

Delivery method

This course will include a weekly live lecture (2 hours) and a workshop-tutorial aka collaborative agile indie game studio (4 hours) component. The course will be delivered via in-person instruction (if all goes well). Students are expected to participate in:

• synchronous activities during the scheduled course times. This includes a live, interactive lecture with demonstrations, discussions and student group presentation/discussion on assigned topics.  In the workshop-tutorial, students will practice and apply the concepts of the lecture in playing, critiquing and designing several games
• asynchronous activities (e.g., independent preparation before the lecture, teamwork, peer work etc. to prepare each week and to pace yourself carefully in order to stay on top of the activities/assignments and to get the most from the class).

The learning environment will be active, supporting, and will afford opportunities for students to strengthen knowledge, skills, and feel a part of a community.
you can find more information and examples/videos of prior course projects at the course website http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/riecke/teaching/iat312/

Respect copyrighted materials
Several items provided in this course and through Canvas or other means have been copied of the Copyright Act as enumerated in SFU Appendix R30.04A - Application of Fair Dealing under Policy R30.04. You may not distribute, e-mail or otherwise communicate these materials to any other person.

Delivery Method

Lecture (LEC) and Studio Labs (STL)

Academic Honesty

Students are expected to follow SFU's code of academic honesty. We are required to forward all suspected cases of academic misconduct to the Director of SIAT, the Chair of Undergraduate Studies and the Dean of Students, where they will be pursued to resolution. This is a very unpleasant process for all involved, so please do not put us in this situation.

REQUIREMENTS:

Class attendance and participation policy: Students are expected to attend and participate in all lectures and labs. Regular attendance and active, supportive participation in class and team activities are necessary to pass; doing otherwise will result in point reductions and in extreme cases failure to pass the course. 
Failure to contribute sufficiently to in-class activities, individual and team assignments, failure to responsibly do your part of the teamwork, or failure to reliably attend and contribute in team meetings can result in additional point reductions.

Deliverables: All deliverables must be submitted (typically to Canvas) by the due date/time. No late submissions will be accepted.

Attendance and participation: Active participation will be required in lectures, and participation marks will stem from participation during lecture discussion as well as activities during the labs, especially ones that are not otherwise graded.