One course, two Northeastern professors, and the dream of a student-run game studio

Whether you play them on your mobile device or a console, digital games have come to play a big role in our lives. Their purposes range from serving as a respite from our professional roles, to playing out of sheer enjoyment. Even though games are so popular because of their details, we hardly think of the makers behind our favorite video games. Two Northeastern University professors are inspiring the next generation of game creators through an experiential learning project course.

The pathway to game design
Originally from the Netherlands, Casper Harteveld has always been passionate about games.

“I think I got my first game console when I was four years old,” he recalled. “I got really hooked, so much so that I read all kinds of game magazines in different languages, because the Dutch ones weren’t enough.”

Harteveld focused on serious games–games designed for a purpose other than pure entertainment– during his doctoral candidacy. He collaborated on a game that helped train people to observe levees and take action before a flood. After receiving his doctorate, Harteveld joined Northeastern as a professor of game design at the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD), with a courtesy appointment at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

Chris Barney, a visiting assistant professor at CAMD, took a different approach to becoming a games professor. As an undergraduate, he studied creative writing and world studies. After taking a computer science course, he realized that he could pursue games as a profession. Barney enjoyed the creative aspects of games, but felt that he needed a stronger computer science understanding. After receiving his bachelor’s in computer science and sociology, he pursued his master’s in computer science, focusing on conversational artificial intelligence in massively multiuser environments.

After showing the industry professionals what he had to offer, Barney joined Poptropica, a popular online role-playing game targeted towards children. At Poptropica, Barney worked on the server-side infrastructure that allowed the game to run.

“We had 500 million users signed up for the game, and I built the social networking layer on it and the user-generated content where people can build their own worlds,” he said. After working in non-game fields as well as on independent games, Barney joined Northeastern’s teaching faculty as a visiting assistant professor.

Now Harteveld and Barney have teamed up to lead the course, “Projects for Professionals: Game Studio” (INAM 5964). This course is a strategic collaboration between the colleges and Northeastern’s Experiential Network to provide broader and more diverse pathways for interdisciplinary experiential opportunities. In this project course, students create deliverables that will result in a published game, including several functional prototypes, a final prototype for quality assurance testing, a final playable game, and marketing materials, like a trailer and flyers. Harteveld heads the faculty research-driven aspect, while Barney captains the student-driven part of the project course.

Extended reality for rehabilitation
On the faculty research-driven side, Harteveld collaborates on an extended reality project with the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Semaa Amin, an Align student in the Silicon Valley campus, works with the faculty-driven side of the course, and collaborated with seven other graduate students, Harteveld, MGH, and MIT to create the project, ‘Chrysalis: adaptive physical rehabilitation in extended reality.’ The Northeastern members of the team won a 2021 RISE award, which Amin said was “unexpected, because our intention was to come up with a prototype that would be helpful for the people undergoing surgery, so it was really nice to be able to be recognized.” Amin was the environment designer on the team, working on the landscapes that users of the VR headset virtually travel to.

“We thought about having the app named Chrysalis to symbolize the final stages of transformation from a Chrysalis or pupa into a butterfly,” Amin explained, “one of the ideas we had for this project was to choose a migrating butterfly species, such as the Monarch butterfly, so that we could make it travel to different places, for example having it start in Canada and then travel down the US West Coast.”

Designing the student-driven side
The course was designed to give students more opportunities to exercise the skills they learn from Northeastern programs. Barney mentioned that this program is the beginning of their process to challenge students while encouraging them to collaborate and showcasing their skills to the outside world.

Said Barney, “There is a lot of work to be done, and a fully student-driven game studio will be the result of years of iterative effort, but this is an exciting place to start.” Harteveld added, “It’s important that we teach the theories and have students critically think about what games mean, but at the end of the day, the best way to engage with games is to actually make them.”

Northeastern offers many combined major programs, and over 30 combined majors are housed in Khoury College, so Harteveld emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary skills in game design.

“Even though our own students are combined majors between Khoury and CAMD, they themselves still don’t have all of the skills needed to create a successful game, he noted. “Because games require marketing, they require graphic design skills, it’s impossible for a single student from any program to have all of those skills. Also, students in English or history can play an important role in creating game narratives or providing historical context.”

Barney noted an additional reason of the importance of the course.

“You know, an issue of scale is the biggest thing, both in terms of the team that [students] get a chance to work with and in terms of the length of the project they work on.”

Harteveld agreed, adding, “It’s harder for students to create a solid game within the context of the classroom; they basically just build and create prototypes. So, what we wanted to do with this was to give students the opportunity to work concretely on a long-term project.”

Keeping in mind what industry professionals told him when he first started, Barney wanted to provide students with opportunities beyond internships and co-ops. “Our goal is to let students participate with the studio and be part of a game published each year that they’re at Northeastern,” he explained. “Then they would be graduating with four published games.”

Danya Zheng, a graduate student in Northeastern’s Game Science and Design program, says the course has taught her “how to design a game in a more standard way, and how to make our game ideas come true” in a structured setting.

The student-driven side of the project course allows students with diverse skillsets to define what kind of games they want to produce and control the process from the ground up, features that Barney calls “a valuable experience.”

“Chris Barney has a certain style when it comes to designing games, and that is through a pattern language,” said third-year computer science and game design student Caleb Myers. “For example, if we want players to have more interactive gameplay, how would we go about solving that? Well, a potential answer is to add a jumping mechanic.” Myers continued, “There’s a lot of these design problems in answer responses collected all in one database, and that is the pattern language that we would use to help develop this game.”

Beyond the course, Harteveld and Barney remain committed to their pedagogy. Barney describes his long-term goal as “teaching students to think in that [design pattern] way and then watching the metrics of the projects that they produce, both in classes and through the studio.”

“We’re still struggling to understand how games are made, what the best way to do it is, and how we should teach it,” Barney continued. “So, my long-term goal is to help that understanding mature, both in academia and industry.”

Harteveld similarly delights in his students’ success and growth.

“MGH is really satisfied with some of our students,” he said. “One of my students got offered an internship and was made a research fellow, so now he directs the internships, I made a joke saying, ‘Well you got promoted pretty quickly,’ but the fact is, MGH trusts him to lead internships – I mean, that’s amazing to me.”

“They’re [students] capable of phenomenal things,” Barney concludes, “they’re really talented, they’re really wise, and they’re going to make games that will change the world.”

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