Student Postmortem: Savannah College's Cowboy Cave

GameCareerGuide.com, Gamasutra’s sister web site for game dev students, newcomers, and educators, has posted a new student postmortem of Cowboy Cave, a project from the Applied Game Design class at Savannah College of Art and Design. The course aims to mimic a true working game development environment, in which the professor plays the role of executive producer. The students say the game came from “the union of two pitches: a narrative concept and a design paradigm.” Concept artist and one of the six student authors Matt Kohr, says of the premise, “Think Diablo, but as a cowboy exploring a cave.” In this excerpt, the students reveal the unintended hindrance of working under the auspices of academia, despite whether much the class truly does replicate a professional game industry studio: “… [T]he irony is, the very environment that enabled the project to exist at all may have unconsciously stymied this effort. By thinking in terms of a course -- one school term of 10 weeks -- we didn’t even consider taking development further until it was all done. We viewed the last day of class as the last day of the project, and even now we find ourselves at somewhat of a loss as to how to proceed. It’s a hazard that many students probably don’t realize exists and has likely been responsible for the demise of many good student games.” Visit GameCareerGuide.com to read the postmortem.