The Capstone game factory: From throwaway projects to legacy software

Abstract Gamification (the use of game elements in non-game contexts) and serious games (fully-fledged games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment) have demonstrated significant potential for enhancing engagement in software engineering education. However, high-quality serious games are resource-intensive to develop and difficult to maintain within the constraints of an academic semester. Consequently, many promising student-developed prototypes rapidly deteriorate into academic abandonware due to the lack of a sustainable maintenance life cycle. To address this issue, we propose the Capstone game factory , a theoretical three-phase circular development model in which serious games are treated as living legacy software rather than throwaway assignments. Senior students in Capstone courses act as maintainers and co-designers, inheriting and refactoring previous cohorts’ work, while junior students contribute educational content. Together, they drive the Brownfield evolution of the software. While full validation of the longitudinal life cycle remains future work, this paper empirically validates its enabling handover mechanism: Phase 2: Expert audit & analysis. To operationalize the maintenance handover, we adapted the MEEGA+ (Model for the Evaluation of Educational Games) and Hexad (Gamification User Types Framework) frameworks into a heuristic inspection protocol. By applying this expert audit to three distinct student prototypes, we demonstrate how assessing gamification debt and design misalignment in legacy artifacts can generate a prioritized maintenance backlog for future students. This approach lays the foundation for transforming the educational constraint of short semesters into a pedagogical advantage, teaching students the vital industrial skills of brownfield development and software maintenance.