Steve Stringer is Director, GameLab at SMU Guildhall, Professor of Practice (Video Game Production), and Academic Advisor at SMU Guildhall. He’s had a long career as a producer in the games industry, which started at Activision back in the 90s when he worked with studios like id and Raven. He moved on to Atari, did some freelancing, and was involved in a game-related start up, before eventually making his way to SMU Guildhall. That was in 2015 and he hasn’t looked back since.

As Director of the GameLab at SMU Guildhall, it's like managing a development studio within SMU Guildhall. This is where the student teams come together from all disciplines and go through every aspect of development in a live studio environment.

One of the program's core pillars is the Team Game Project (TGP) set of courses. In TGP1, small teams learn the fundamentals of development on a Unity game. The course is designed to teach the basics of Agile, pipelines, and communications. In TGP2, they bring the entire cohort together as one team to create a game in a single semester. This course teaches communication, conflict resolution, pipelines, and soft-skills management at scale, all while making a game in three months.

For their Capstone project, the training wheels come off and they're doing it "for real." His team spends the summer semester in pre-production, going through multiple rounds of pure idea generation. They then greenlight two to four of the most viable concepts and spend the remainder of the summer prototyping and preparing for production which begins in the fall. Students move through all phases of production in the fall to produce and publish the titles!

When asked what he considers to be the biggest breakthrough in game development he offered “ it's dozens of little ones made each year with each new cycle. These are improvements on team efficacy, psychological safety, communications, soft-skills management, and oversight/project management methodologies. The very terrible name for this is "hyper-rapid development," and it's something that is unique to our program.”

With more than 150 projects under his belt, Stringer mentioned they push the limits and boundaries every year, and his teams keep exceeding expectations. One of the most recent releases called "Kibbi Keeper" made by their recently graduated Cohort 30. Other projects are posted on DevMesh.

“I know I speak with everyone on our faculty team: we LOVE what we do. We get paid to work with a diverse spectrum of incredibly talented, creative people. We get paid to push the boundaries of our industry, and work to advocate positive change. With somewhere around 1,000 alumni over our 20-year history, we have graduates in practically every studio in the world. It's an amazing feeling to help these folks achieve their goals.”