Development Practice (30 credits)
By devising a series of small-scale creative artefacts, you will use your existing ideas about development practice and then experiment with new approaches to challenge these ideas. This will enable you to create a personal case study, from which you can define how to expand and enrich your practice. Beyond the personal case study, you will gain a broader sense of the contexts in which these practices are applied across disciplines.
Game Development (30 credits)
You’ll develop and combine skills from the art, design and programming disciplines to create your own small indie game. This will help you understand how game development draws from many different disciplines and explain the different tasks involved in making games. By the end of the module you will have made a game yourself and produced a report that explains the cross-disciplinary context for your creative process.
Co-creative Design and Development Practice (30 credits)
You'll work in a team on a problem-led creative project. This will typically, but not necessarily, be a small game or creative app. You will work together to situate, design, implement and evaluate your creative artefact. With the support of a supervisor, you will strategically manage scope, workflow, communication roles and responsibilities. At the end, you will have produced an original artefact based on your own intellectual property which clearly illustrates how you can engage an audience.
Indie Game Start-Up (30 credits)
You’ll design and prepare to launch a small business with a focus on indie game development. You’ll investigate and assess market opportunities in an area of your choice. This could involve exploring your audience, comparing how game businesses operate, contrasting business models, and considering how intellectual property can be managed. You’ll then decide on which business opportunity your indie game is responding to and devise a business plan. You’ll consider branding, cash flow modelling, enterprise planning, incorporation, seeking further investment, and interrogating routes to market. This will underpin further development and launch of your indie game.
Final Major Project (60 credits)
You’ll work on a major research and development project, either independently or with others. This allows you to expand and consolidate your skills of devising, developing and executing an extended development project. You can build upon your projects from other modules or develop a new concept. You should finish the course with a polished project of a publishable quality. A supervisor will act as your mentor and adviser. If you’re planning to start your own business following this MA, your supervisor can direct you to professional services staff for business mentoring.
