A successful videogame development team requires effective collaboration between computer programmers, game designers, instructional designers, user-interface designers, graphic artists, animators, sound designers, musicians, voiceover artists, playtesters and quality assurance testers. We invite you to write a 2-page personal essay that: (i) explains your motivation for joining the Human Development Lab or Video Games Research Lab, (ii) highlights 2-3 of the above roles that you can play in a winning game development team, and (iii) your strengths which make you an excellent candidate for the highlighted roles. This essay needs to be accompanied by a portfolio that demonstrates compelling evidence of these strengths.
We encourage you to exercise initiative and creativity in deciding what goes into your portfolio. We want you to show us how you have previously challenged yourself to be the best that you are capable of achieving. If you require clarification or additional resources to prepare the strongest possible application, you are most welcome to contact Prof. Matthew Kam at mattkam@cs.cmu.edu as early as possible. We recognize that some applicants are motivated enough to perform additional tasks for your portfolio, and we can provide such tasks as “extra credit.”
The personal essay should be submitted as a PDF document. The portfolio can take the form of email attachments or URLs. It is a good idea to ensure that your name and email address can be found in each PDF, applet and source code. You should submit your application as a single email, i.e. please don't confuse us by breaking up your application into multiple emails.
Just to give you a sense of what a solid portfolio entails... It can include work that you have done for a highly-challenging class assignment, or work that you submitted as entries to major competitions. Tell us about how you approached these tasks and your thought process. For example, if you want to demonstrate your talents in graphics design, let us see artwork and animations that you have previously developed, and let us know what software you used to create them. Help us to understand the options that you considered and the rationale for the design decisions that you made.
As another example, if you plan to impress us with your programming skills, let us look at the source code and working implementations of the applications you have developed. For the latter, you can either upload the application online as a web applet and let us have the URL, or email us the applet in a way that is easy for us to run. Your applications should be developed in a serious programming language such as Java or C/C++/C#, as opposed to a scripting language. The ideal applications would reflect a good understanding of how to write applications that perform reasonably well in real-time on low-resource devices, which may include good memory management practices, 8-bit assembly language programming, and performance optimization.
Submissions will be evaluated based on their quality, attention to detail, and ability to communicate well in writing. For example, we will review your source code to see that you have employed good programming practices, such that your code does not hard-code anything, is easy to maintain and is easy to read. Your binary implementations should run smoothly without bugs or memory overflows. We will expect you to be proud enough about your prior prototypes and their user-interfaces to show them to a job interviewer. Other important user-interface considerations include having (i) a consistent look-and-feel across multiple screens, as well as (ii) menus and navigation options that are intuitive and easy to locate. Demonstrating maturity when communicating with us over email will ensure your submission receive a more thorough review. On the whole, we expect your submissions to convey a strong, positive impression about your work ethic and you as a decent human being.
Important note on plagiarism: The portfolio that you submit should be your own work, i.e. do not copy work from elsewhere that someone else did. If you are showing us work that you did with other project team members, you have an ethical obligation to clearly specify what your individual contributions were.