Course overview

Our MA Games Design covers both advanced theoretical and practical strands ensuring you are fully literate in areas such as complex gameplay design, project management, advanced mission design and gameplay implementation.

You develop key transferable skills such as advanced presentation skills and are encouraged to creatively experiment with ways of conveying concepts and information.

The course develops your prototyping skills and knowledge in relation to game design to prepare you for a career in the games industry. You gain advanced practical skills required for complex mission design and implementation, as well as the ability to create advanced gameplay scenarios and professional design documents. You learn to tackle complex game development scenarios and apply advanced game management techniques, ensuring projects are organised in a professional manner from pre-production through production, delivery and project closure. You study advanced concepts relating to optimisation of games and create a game prototype with consideration for industry level design roles.

The final semester involves the master’s project. This is a large 60 credit module where you can design and develop a large project based on research. It has been designed to allow you to further develop and display the advanced skills and knowledge you have acquired over the programme. There are three routes you can choose from to gain an MA Games Design:

• full-time - 2 years with advanced practice (September and January start)
• full-time - 1 year (September start) or 16 months (January start)
• part-time - 2 years.

How you are assessed

The programme assessment strategy has been designed to assess your subject specific knowledge, cognitive and intellectual skills and transferable skills applicable to the workplace. The strategy ensures that you are provided with formative assessment opportunities throughout the programme which support your summative assessments. There is a mix of practical work (usually in the form of a portfolio), poster and viva presentations, written reports. Formative feedback is typically given during lectures, tutorials and summative feedback using on-line methods. The assessments can include individual or group work. The assessment criteria, where appropriate, will include assessment of presentation skills and report writing.

Career opportunities

We prepare you for a career in industry. In addition to your taught classes, we create opportunities for you to meet and network with our industry partners through events such as our ExpoSeries, which showcases student work to industry. ExpoTees is the pinnacle of the ExpoSeries with over 100 businesses from across the UK coming to the campus to meet our exceptional students, with a view to recruitment.