Learning Game Design and Software Engineering through a Game Prototyping Experience: A Case Study

This report describes a case study of small-scale effort in employing game playtesting as a starting point for learning about mainstream issues and challenges found in modern software engineering projects and practices. The goal is to be descriptive and informing through a qualitative rendering, rather than prescriptive and quantitative analysis. This study draws attention to the case of where a student with no prior experience in software development or programming must take on the task of learning how to make a game, and along the way learn about many common challenges in modern SE practice through personal discovery and experience. The game itself also imposes challenges in that we have chosen a new, unfamiliar game genre and domain that emphasizes science learning as its purpose for play. Along the way, we discuss issues in requirements, design, prototyping, testing, user experience assessment, and evolutionary software extension, all prior to a formal education in coding or introductory level Computer Science or SE. Though our efforts may seem unusual or anomalous, we believe our methods are open for adoption and reuse by those interested in lowering the barriers to entry into game software development in specific, and into SE more generally.