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Students Compete at Video Game Creation
zalas writes "Stanford's computer graphics class holds a video game writing competition each year at the end of the term, and this year's results are finally online. You can download all the finalist entries from the website. The winning entries featured very original game concepts, such as sending a spiked soccer ball through wormhole planets or infesting a growing maze of cheese with mold. Judges at the competition included representatives from Electronic Arts, Microsoft and the creator of Pong, Allan Alcorn. Ironically enough, the winners of the wacky category who received a voucher for an XBOX360 wrote a game that only worked on OSX laptops with the drop-protection motion sensors."
But was it as ironic as ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife?
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
maybe they should check their definition of irony
i use only OSX, and the Xbox360 is at the top of my wish list.
Competition == Good
I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.
_ 01.shtml Recommended read.
The Experimental Gameplay Project began as a student pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:
1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.
As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" Though we successfully met our goal of making over 50 games, we realized that this project had become much less about the games, and much more about the crazy development process - and how we could help others do the same thing. We wrote about this process in our whitepaper How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.
How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler
a) not everyone can access port 8090 from behind a firewall.
b) It's Stanford. Do you really think they're lacking for bandwidth?
non-Coral link here
Trolling is a art,
How is "Baron von Puttyngton versus the Cancerous M.C. Escher Maze of Cheese" NOT the wackiest game? Instead, it gets the loser "second place" of dinner at Il Fornio. I'd MUCH rather have the XBox 360.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why is it that the only mac game is the one without a download link?
For added realism, comes with the genuine HeartAttack Inducer (TM) guaranteed to trigger an actual heart attack during gameplay. Our patent pending CattleProd(TM) technology shocks the player into one or more heart attacks (configurable) through repeated, powerful jolts of raw electric power synchronized with in-game events.
An optional multiplayer add-on pack offers even more realism by automatically dialling 911 so Emergency services, paramedics and the ER crew can join in for some fast-paced, dynamic action.
Beta testers wanted.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Fire a rifle at a target, you might hit the bullseye. Fire buck shot at a target, you can't miss the bullseye.
Make 1 game and maybe it's a hit. Make 50 games, there's bound to be a hit.
My work here is dung.
OSX laptop with drop motion sensor...so what would that game be?
physically throwing the laptop up and down to score points ?
But these kids are getting cute and innovative. My question is, can they make a brilliant enough game that is PG that would sell more than GTA? Is that even theoretically possible, in light of Freudian theory? The only innovation I can think of to top GTA is things involving mothers but as I noted before that would so cross the line, so that gets ruled out.
Ironically enough, the winners of the wacky category who received a voucher for an XBOX360 wrote a game that only worked on OSX laptops with the drop-protection motion sensors."
If you think about it...these kids attended the same school, and got the same education. If Stanford concentrates on OSx and Linux, well yea their programs are going to run on similar platforms...they are classmates, studying in the same classes. Now if you said out of 10 different schools, with different teaching methodologies (including windows coding), and all those students used OSx and Linux...then I would say "ironic"
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
P is for Pause
R is for Reset
H will turn off the display
L will skip to the next level
Ctrl brings up a 3D 'map'. By rotating this, you change the gravity vector. (you might have to use the mouse scroll wheel)
The numbers 1-9 turn on/off various shading for the cheeseball
The controls are a bit dodgy, but it's fun for a while.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The Labyrin3D which won the XBOX is actually a pretty darn cool idea! For those that didn't RTFA it is just like one of those little kids toy's where you must tilt the box around to roll a ball through the maze.
The cool factor comes from the fact that it utilizes the gyros (drop sensors) in the Apple laptop so that you play by tilting the laptop back and forth.
Cool!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Labyrinth
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Spaceballs has an entirely new meaning now.
So, did anybody see a link for downloading Labyrin3D?
Except you get a good grade instead of a prize for creating a good game. There's nothing like 6 guys spending 10 weeks to develop a 3d multiplayer game. Tons of fun. Tons of sleepless hours in the lab. http://pisa.ucsd.edu/cse190/
Forecast for tomorrow: A few sprinklings of genius with a chance of DOOM!
Some intresting features in the engine. The "portal" system is totally seamless and you jump from one planet to the next. Even the snakes, which crawl very smoothly and rather realistically, go from one planet to the next. If you take a look around, you can clearly see the snakes crawling along the other planets.
Better yet, I only got one crash from it! :-) (Smashing too many buttons at once, methinks, but not sure.)
When I was in my sophomore year high school we had a similar game coding contest at the end of the year, mandatory for all CS students, and voluntary for any student who wanted to enter. There were a lot of cool little games out of it, but mine took first. Not that it was amazing, it was a missile commander clone with the twist of being multiplayer, where up to 4 people could play, 2 defending, and 2 setting the attack points and trajectories. Being the mischeveous little bastard I was back then, I hid a backdoor through an intentional buffer overflow, which was a relatively obscure tactic at the time (1995ish). For my junior and senior years in high school I had a blast messing with other students when they were playing my game, which was now installed by default on all computers in the lab for those that came to play games at lunch. After graduation, I passed on the secret to one of my underclassman friends, and he did the same, for a few years it was an underground legacy until finally someone caught on. I got a call from my old CS teacher, he wanted me to know he thought it was funny, and my game is still installed on all the computers, though patched, and used as his model for teaching the new students what a vulnerability is, and how to find and fix them.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Oh sure, I was a finalist a few years back in this video game competition and I just got a pat on the back. This year's entries get front page on slashdot and the adoration (and criticism) of the entire nerd world! Not that I'm jealous or anything, I just like to have my ego fed every once in a while.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Check out the games from THREE years ago:
s /cs248-videogame-competition/cs248-02/
http://graphics.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/course
I'd say i'm fairly unimpressed by the lack of improvement of the games over the years. 2002 was a leap in the quality of games over previous years and the subsequent years have just been disappointing. The winner of 02, The Return of Oscuro, pushed cel-shading, polygon-level collision detection, full real-time shadowing, and a host of other techniques that few commercial games had at that time. It even had it's own muscial score custom written for it and a nice silly story line. Pretty good for about 3 weeks of work I'd say.
And similar to the course at the ETH. (To get used to the Eiffel libraries)
More games here:
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/games/04/
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/games/05/
...because you can easily sell it on ebay.
Thank you for the standard PORT80 non-coral cache link!
Anyone want to write a small routine where, if you hold your laptop upside down and shake it, your hard drive is reformatted?
Dark Reflection
http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/
It is initially tough to convice some of the older, conservative faculty that learning how to write games is something that CMU should be teaching its students. But on second-look, one realizes that what students really learn is fundamental to all of computer science: efficient data structures, effective resource management and memory usage, good user interfaces, handling images and multimedia content, process threading and multi-user networking, etc. However, with a game programming class, you get to teach all of this stuff in a fun way, where students are extremely self-motivated to learn it all.
The class has been quite popular, and many of my students have gone off to work in the game development industry. The best feedback I have received has been from students who enjoyed the fact that their final game projects have been the the only pieces of software they have written during their university days that had a lifetime beyond the course itself. I think game programming is an excellent way to teach coding skills and working as part of a development team, which is a very practical part of any CS curriculum.
There are downloadable movies of some of the recent lab projects here (all written in portable OpenGL code:
http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/labs/lab1/
http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/labs/lab2/
Yeah, because the video game and movie industries aren't that profitable. They only generate what? $5 billion or something like that every year in revenues? Programmers that work in that industry make what? $60,000/year salary on average?
There are plenty of decent subjects which you can actually achieve and produce valuable code. Games are just throw away work afterall. Engineering areas need good programs for simulation, nuclear stations could use better monitoring programs, even improvements to existing code which does REAL WORK is great too!
Keep in mind that some of the most demanding programming is game development. It requires knowledge of math, physics, and knowing every hardware and software hack on the books. Everything that they learn designing these games can be applicable to other areas as well. Most of the students in the class are graduate students doing real research and not punk "kids". By the time a lot of people take this class you've already weeded out most of those "I want to get a CS degree so I can write games!" crowd anyway.
This game competition is not part of a games class, but part of a graphics class that is very graphics-theory intensive which has a wide range of applications besides games. It's just that writing games is a great way of learning and applying those theories.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
A video game that simulates making a video game and you compete with others to make the dopest video game inside the video game. Wait...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I could never motivate myself to make a product which wastes time for everyone.
You begin by speaking for yourself. Why didn't you stay on this track?
Real innovation comes from making productive programs which not only save time, but make money.
Real innovation can come from all manner of sources, however unlikely your prejudices make them seem. This sounds like a fuddy-duddy "rap isn't real music" argument.
I hope these kids [...] I recommend these kids [...] I don't really understand kids [...] I know most of the kids [...] KIDS!
I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
You are not as smart as the Quake engine author, you can't do it by yourself. Quit the overzealous cocky attitude!
Now why would you say something like that? Any one of these "kids" could very well be as smart as the Quake engine author. Don't go around pushing your can't-do attitude on potentially bright young programmers. Would you say the same thing if they had an ambitious plan to make, say, a really good electronics simulator?
Games are just throw away work afterall.
Despite all your whining, the video game industry is a $11 billion industry in the United States alone, and keep in mind that video games are similarly huge in Japan, Canada and the UK. And the aforementioned Quake engine author appeared number 10 in TIME's 50 most influential people in technology. Not bad for throw away work.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
That's really cool about the Labyrinth game -- it would be cool if Neverball were modified to use a similar input device. It works off of a similar principle, the graphics are fantastic, and it would be sortof an open-source Revolution controller. :)
%s/game/slashdot/g
I always love seeing stuff like this because often you see more innovation or cool gameplay concepts in these and independant games than you see in the "big company" games. Athough mentioned awhile back on slashdot I believe, I also recommend people check out http://www.igf.com/2006entrants.shtml to see all the finalists in this year's indie games competition. Proffessor Fizzwizzle has consumed countless hours of my free time lately much as Breakquest did for me last year.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
The gaming/animation degree majors at the better schools require some exposure to the liberal arts. In a game or animation you are telling a story , something humans have been doing around the evening campfire for tens of thousands of years. You depicting interesting characters, running them through plots, building and dissipating tension and so on. In an animation these are general frozen in one story line, where in a game these elements are manipulated by the player(s).
There's hundreds of years of techniques and examples for telling good stories in all sorts of media- novels, song lyrics, movies, etc. A good liberal arts program will teach you these techniques and expose you examples from different eras, cultures and media.
<bitter>It doesn't say what year these students were, but here is a game I worked on second year at BCIT (a CS course obviously). It was networked with nice graphics, sound, physics, a nice level designer and even pretty fun to play. All I got for it was a good grade.</bitter>
The stair and truck dismount have been a long time favorite with me. I have spent hours hitting that poor lifeless figure with a truck. It is disturbing just how much fun it is.
"Students compete at Video Slashdot creation"? I don't get it. Or think I want to get it.
Plenty of other schools do the same (or better), e.g.:
/ final//
http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/teaching/csc476
http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/projects
Want to work 80 hour weeks to rent a dumpy apartment in east LA? Go ahead and compete in game programming contests. Interesting to see both sides of an industry: the previous generation of students who hate their jobs, hate not being allowed a life, and complain about getting laid off because of age and the next generation students who are eager to get into crunch mode and make huge sacrifices for their bosses.
Was performance even considered? Of the three windows games I downloaded: firefly wanted to send an error report to Microsoft; baron took 100% of the CPU and I couldn't control it; and socker ball took 100% of the CPU. I've got the latest windows XP crap and an NVidia video card with 128 Megs of memory and all kinds of excelleration, so how did these games win if they're running at ~1fps?
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
This must be old news to these guys http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/aboutcse/newstories/200301 24-games.html
User speaking: T5um3
Reason: Evading karma blocker. Fuck you trolldot admins! Block me neva1!!oneone!
You obviously don't know anything about the game industry. As a game developer, you aren't going to make more than 100k year. Especially when you are working for EA games. I recommend you read up on all the cons of being a game developer. As you did not read my statement, I said game developers hired by the companies which makes the billions, not the developer, are overworked and underpaid. If you had *ANY* clue, you would have not trolled all over my statement like a game user.
Have a look... http://pvs.uni-muenster.de/pvs/projects/rokkatan/
I think you mean denial
I dunno about that. It seems like I just trivially obtained a piece of paper that results in greater wealth generation potential, increasing my health, happiness, and all sorts of other neat things that will improve my quality of life and give me more resources with which to pursue my dreams, satisfy my desires, and make the world a better place.
Living failure? Bah.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Our Final Project group did the exact same sort of thing. 5 months, complete game, yadda yadda. Not a lot of people can appreciate how much work goes into creating a game. I just wish that we had national recognition for our final projects.. with prizes and guest appearances. Our game, Balls to the Wall is a damn fine game.. and we did it with 4 people in 5 months, and by creating all of our assets and tech, as well as 250 pages of design / tech docs. My hats off to the Stanford students.
Colonel Cranium this is Rectal Reconnaissance, we are on a collision course sir, Abort Abort!
"You obviously don't know anything about the game industry. As a game developer, you aren't going to make more than 100k year."
I would say you're the one who doesn't know anything about the game industry. I've made > $150k salery per year plus bonuses for the past 6 years at multiple companies. After taking my recent job 3 other companies said they would have matched or offered more. This isn't to brag. I'm a decent programmer, but I know a lot of far better ones.
When you're a good worker and have good experience, you can get a good salery. Unfortunately, there's a lot of mediocre ones out there and they tend to complain a lot about their saleries instead of looking for a decent company to work for.
About Labiry3d: I know of a PalmOS game named Mulg, which is about navigating a marble through a maze. Normally it is done by pressing buttons, but there is an option of connecting a motion detector (or maybe some PalmOS devices come with it), and then it is navigated by tilting. So it is not that original ;)
I'm really excited to see the download count of my Baron Von Puttyngton game increase so rapidly!!! I can now say I've made it big since I've been Slashdotted!
On a side note, it looks like Stanford has noticed the traffic increase. This is from an email I just recieved:
While performing routine network management, we observed traffic patterns that suggest your computer is being used in peer-to-peer file sharing.
I ask this, because back in 1998 I had a 486, and wrote a Binary Spatial Partition algorithm in C, based upon the description in a 1987(?)IEEE symposium synopsis book. It was complicated and difficult. It was also super slow on my 33Mhz machine. It would do 1 frame every 10 seconds or so.
So then I simplified it down to integer stuff, and got to 1 frame every 2 seconds.
That wasn't good enough, so I rewrote the darn thing in assembler/machine code, and got it down to about 5 frames a second.
Now, a standard modern student's computer might be 1 Ghz, so that's 30 times as fast. I'm guessing that they could get away with plain C code, therefore, except that they still have to do game play and probably music.
So maybe they just had to do the plane-drawing algorithm in machine code. That's still tremendously difficult.
And then they have to design a game around it as well?
If they did all that, I have to say I'm impressed.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.
You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellent resources available, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.
Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.
Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.
Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"War of the Penguins" is for Windows.
Now I'm not normally a Linux nerd but that don't seem quite right.