Project Information

This page contains all the information you should need to prepare and submit your final project, project presentations, and peer feedback. Please read it carefully!

Due Dates
Requirements
Presentations
Student Feedback
Scoring

1. Due Dates

Presentation materials: You must email me an advance copy of your game program files, game media (audio files, text data files, and images), and presentation files (any Powerpoint slides you intend to use) on the day before your scheduled presentation. The program files do not need to be 100% complete by the day of presentation, just complete enough to demonstrate your game. The game files you submit by email will not be graded, but your Powerpoint slides will be part of your presentation grade.
Feedback forms: These will be provided to you at each presentation. The only way to receive credit is to attend the presentations.
Project report: No project report will be required. This places more weight on your project presentation and project content, however. Your project will need to be well-commented enough that a grader should not need to read a report in order to interpret what you did. To this end, documenting your code with comments is a significant portion of your overall project grade.
Final submission: Submit your final program files (including all audio files, text data files, and images), in the Carmen project dropbox, before midnight on Saturday, December 5th. These are the project game files that will be graded.

2. Requirements

Here are the requirements for your class project that you will need to fulfill in order to get full credit:

The game must be sufficiently complex to have warranted four weeks of work.
The game must accept user input, and the input must eventually determine whether the user wins or loses.
There must be a way to win, and a way to lose. Both must be possible.
The user must receive feedback about whether the user has won or lost.
At least one of the following must be true:

The game is somewhat difficult to win.
The game has multiple levels, of differing difficulty.
The game has a way for the user to control the difficulty.

The game should be at least two of the following: interesting, fun, novel.
Gameplay should be smooth and without obvious errors, within the boundaries of what Phrogram reasonably allows.
Your code should be clean, broken into appropriate modules, and well-commented. Well-commented code means a comment at the beginning of your program listing the authors, date, and a description of the program. In addition, there should be a comment preceding each class, operation, data member of a class, and program-level variable. There should also be a comment before any region of code that requires further explanation for clarity.

3. Presentations

Presentations will be about 18 minutes per team, with a few minutes for questions afterwards. They should meet the following criteria:

You must email me your presentation files at least one day in advance of the day you are scheduled to present. (See Due Dates above for what to email.)
Every team member must talk during the presentation, so you should plan your time.
You should describe what you worked on, the challenges you faced in writing the program, how you overcame those challenges, and what each person worked on. You should mention how your project changed from its original design, if any. If work remains to be done, describe what wasn't completed that you intended to.
Your presentation should consist of a few slides in Powerpoint that describe your system (how you decomposed the program into components, structured the flow of control, etc.).
You should demonstrate the game, of course! But the majority of your time should focus on your descriptions of what you did, how you did it, and why.

4. Student Feedback

Student feedback is important to presentations in this class, because it will help you to become a better speaker. You are expected to show up for each class session during student presentations.

Giving feedback to your peers counts for 2% of your grade divided among the six groups you'll be providing feedback to. You will use the same grading rubric that I do, described in brief below. I will summarize your feedback and provide it to your peers anonymously before the Final.

5. Scoring

Projects (75% of your overall project grade) are scored as follows, out of 100%:

20% for having a game that works and is free of obvious errors
15% for having well-organized and modular code
15% for appropriate comments
10% for how difficult the game was to implement in the time allotted
10% for smooth gameplay (pleasant responsiveness to user controls)
10% for providing a polished appearance and interface to the game, including win and loss conditions
10% for originality, how fun the game is, and how interesting it is to play
10% for an appropriate game difficulty level for players

Presentations (25% of your overall project grade) are scored as follows. Each team member will be scored individually:

Speech: from 1 to 5 points. Are you able to clearly communicate ideas for your portion of the speech?
Teamwork: from 1 to 5 points. Does your speech compliment the overall theme of the presentation? Did you describe what you worked on as part of the team?
Clarity: from 1 to 5 points. Do your visual aids and examples clearly demonstrate what you did? Did you flow from point to point smoothly?
Content: from 1 to 5 points. Did you address the challenges you faced, how you overcame them, and how your project changed since inception?
Audience: from 1 to 5 points. Did you maintain eye contact and pay attention to your audience? Did you respond to audience questions and concerns, if there were any?

The presentation grade for all five items will be averaged, for a total grade between 1 and 5 points.