Homework Five

Assigned 4/24/03, due noon 5/3/03

It is time to start pinning down your term project. At this point we want you to:

• Form a team, or decide to go it alone.  We recommend teams of two or three people.  
• Plan your term project in detail.

Please remember that you will be showing off your creation at the Game Design Course Party, June 6st, 4pm -- 9pm, instead of a final exam.  The CS department and industry game developers will be invited, so it should be great fun.  But, given this hard "ship date", you'll need to plan more carefully than you may be used to.  That is what this part of the homework assignment is about.  

Good planning is an important ingredient in any successful project.   Given the short timeframe you are working in and the other constraints on your time, creating a workable plan is even more important.  Consequently, what we want from you (i.e., each team) this week are the following things:

A Prospectus of somewhere between three and ten pages, describing your proposed project.  You need to state who will be involved, what the project is, why it is interesting, what you will do, and what you will learn from it.  

A Gantt chart for your project. A Gantt chart identifies the tasks necessary to complete a project and the relationships that hold between them.  To learn how to lay out a Gantt chart, you will use Microsoft Project, which is installed in the CS Lab.  The tutorial material it contains provides all the information you need about Gantt charts.  Your Gantt chart needs to include the following information:

• For each task, please use the Notes field to provide us with additional information about the task.
• Please identify the technologies you will be using (game engines, SDKs, tools, programming environments, etc.), and how familiar you are with them. If using unfamiliar tools, the Gantt chart should also account for the time it will take you to learn them, and include a fallback plan in case they don't work out as expected.
• There are two milestones that you need to meet:
  1. You will be giving an in-class progress presentation, complete with PowerPoint slides and (with luck) a demo, during the week of May 19th.
  2. You will need to have the software ready for play at the Game Design Course Party on June 6th, and hand in the report describing what you did and what you learned no later than the following Monday (June 9th).  

Your homework submission should be the prospectus as a self-contained Microsoft Word document, and the .mpp file you create with Project.

Last edited 4/28/03 by RZ.
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