- Run a playable station: set up your build so a stranger can sit down and play it.
- Present your final — the build, the trailer, and the process behind it — under time.
- Give and take a real crit: play a peer's work and respond to substantive questions.
- Position your project in the 2026 real-time landscape and name what you'd build next.
- Submit a complete final package: build link, trailer, process book, AILOG, and reflection.
1:30 · Brief How the showcase runs
This is the final. There's no lecture and no new AI lab today — the work is done, and now it gets played, seen, and defended.
Stations, rotation, guests
We run the room as a showcase, not a slide deck. Each of you sets up a station — your build running, a controller or keyboard ready, your trailer looping nearby. We rotate in rounds so everyone both presents and plays. Invited guests — faculty and folks from outside the class — will move through the room and sit down at your station, so it has to be legible to someone who has never seen it. If a stranger can't start playing in ten seconds, fix that before the doors open.
What a final crit is for
A crit isn't applause and it isn't a takedown. It's the room taking your work seriously enough to play it, question it, and place it. You'll present what you built and how — including where an agent helped and where your judgment overrode it — and then you'll answer the one question every project answers today: where does this sit in the 2026 landscape, and what would you build next? That question is how professionals talk about work, and today you practice it out loud.
The field you're shipping into: Unreal everywhere, UE6 on the horizon, agents in the editor, mocap in your pocket, and distribution one upload away. At crit, every project answers one question: where does this work sit in that landscape — and what would you build next?
1:40 · Setup Playtest stations, live
We turn the room into an exhibition floor and get every build playable at a station before guests arrive.
- Stand up your station
Get your packaged build running fullscreen — the copy from itch.io or a local packaged build, whichever is more reliable on the room's machines. Have a backup ready: a second device, or the zipped build on a USB drive. Never let a cold machine be the reason your work doesn't show.
- Make it legible in ten seconds
Put a title card or the trailer on loop beside the station, and a one-line "how to play" within reach. A guest should be able to sit, read one line, and start. Every second of setup you save them is a second they spend actually in your game.
- Loop your trailer
Have your 60–90 second trailer playing on a second screen or window. It pulls people to your station and it's your answer for anyone who can't wait through a full playthrough — the whole game, sold in a minute.
- Do a live shakedown
Have the person at the next station play yours cold while you watch, one last time. Fix anything that hangs, confuses, or crashes now. This is the last playtest of the semester — use it.
- Confirm your submission is in
Before crit starts, verify your final package is actually turned in — build link live, trailer exported, process book and AILOG submitted. A great showcase with a missing deliverable is still an incomplete final. Check it off now.
2:00 · Crit Present, play, position
The heart of the day. Each student presents; the rest of us play; everyone answers the landscape question.
We go one project at a time. You get the floor to present your build and your process — what you made, the decisions that shaped it, where the agents helped and where you overrode them. Then the room plays it, live, while you take questions. Every crit closes on the same prompt, answered by you and opened to the room: where does this work sit in the 2026 landscape, and what would you build next? Guests weigh in alongside classmates. This is the conversation the whole semester was training you to hold — treat it as the real thing, because it is.
- Your published build link — the playable packaged build on
itch.io. - A 60–90 second trailer of the work.
- A process book documenting how the project was made.
- Your full-semester
AILOG.mdplus a one-page reflection.
3:10 · Wrap Recognition & where the work goes next
We close the semester together. There's recognition — the builds that surprised us, the process that showed real growth, the crits that pushed the room — and then a straight conversation about where this work goes from here. Your final isn't a school assignment you file away; it's a portfolio piece and a live itch.io page you can put in front of anyone. We talk about what to polish for your reel, what to keep building, and where to take these skills next — including FMX 430 Spatial Computing, where the same real-time craft moves into XR. You came in fifteen weeks ago tracing the pipeline on a whiteboard. Today you shipped something people played. That's the whole job.
After FMX 320
- itch.io — flip your draft to public; your final becomes a live portfolio page anyone can download and play.
- Portfolio — cut your best shots and this build into a reel; a demonstrable project beats a résumé line.
- FMX 430 Spatial Computing — the next step: the same real-time Unreal skills move into XR and virtual production.
- Epic Developer Community Learning — keep building; free guided courses and tutorials to deepen what you started here.