Slashdot Mirror
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.
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,
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.
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...
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.
...because you can easily sell it on ebay.
because there are no games on the Mac, duh
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)
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. :)
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.