My third semester on my master was when I participated in DADIU (The National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment). Dadiu is a specialisation, where students from different universities and art schools are taught a joint curriculum.

The semester starts with a 2-3 day trip where there is a chance to get to know everyone, and meet the team which I worked with for the semester. The teams are of 15-17 people. With 5 leads: the game director, project manager, art director, lead programmer and game designer. The rest of the team consisted of 6 programmers, 3 3D artists, an animator, an audio designer and me the level designer. Then the semester starts properly.

Joint Curriculum

The first four weeks are a joint curriculum, where there are lectures about different parts of game development. There is a 2 day workshop to help everybody learn to use Unity. And a week is spent on a mini game production. In a week the team goes through the entire process of creating a small game. We created ChewMe, a game about a chewing gum.

Competence Project

The next four week where spent doing different things dependent on the role you had on the team. The first week the level designers and game designers from all the six teams had a workshop on Board games, and got to work together to create one.

The following two weeks was a level design workshop. Where all the level designers used GameGlobe to create levels. Most levels had specific things to focus upon. See this post for more details.

The last week I joined my team leads in the final week of preproduction, to start sketching levels, for the game they had come up with.

Final Game Production

The last 6 weeks of Dadiu was the final game production, where we developed the game the leads had come up with during pre-production. We created Punish Panda, which is a game about killing Pandas. During the six weeks there were feedback sessions. Here teachers from Dadiu and guests from the industri came by the hear the pitch of the game and give feedback and advise. Usually there was one session a week.