ABC-Sprints: adapting Scrum to academic game development courses

  • Authors:

  • Jonas Schild;Robert Walter;Maic Masuch

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We propose a course design that fits a practical game development project into a regular game design lecture course. As this approach requires a consistent structure, our concept proposes an adaption of Scrum that is based on the game development life-cycle: ABC-Sprints consist of three Sprints to iteratively create Alpha, Beta and Completed versions of a game. We present a detailed walkthrough of the course and give results of a formal evaluation. These indicate that ABC-Sprints help students to manage their workload and to increase productivity over time. Consequently, three teams each presented a game at the end of the course that technically exceeded typical outcomes of game projects without lectures. We hence encourage to apply ABC-Sprints to other curricula and provide a set of recommendations.