MA Games Design (with Advanced Practice)

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 first semester 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. The second semester enables you 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 will learn about 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 and dissertation. 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.

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.

The one-year programme is a great option if you want to gain a traditional MSc qualification. The two-year master’s degree with advanced practice enhances your qualification by adding a vocational or research based internship to the one-year master’s programme. A vocational internship is a great way to gain work experience and give your CV a competitive edge. A research internship provides you with the opportunity to develop your analytical, team-working, research and academic skills by working alongside a research team in an academic setting. We guarantee a research internship, but cannot guarantee a vocational internship. We will, however, provide you with practical support and advice on how to find and secure your own vocational internship position should you prefer this type of internship.