I'm an active member of Warwick Game Design, a student society devoted to designing and creating games.
I've been involved in one long-term society project:
This is a puzzle game of sorts. I'm the lead programmer on the project, and I'm pretty pleased with the result.
Every term we also run a competition where you have just 48 hours to design and create a game from scratch.
Here are the entries I've been involved in:
This was my first real attempt at making a game, and I was fortunate to have Sam on my team to teach me the ropes. I learnt an awful lot about game design and game-related programming techniques thanks to him, and also managed to teach myself how to do graphics in Java.
In hindsight, it was an excellent introduction to making games - a 2D top-down game has no gravity or complicated physics, and most game objects can be either circles or squares.
This was a classic case of not focusing on the right areas and making things more complicated than they needed to be.
I didn't know it at the time, but this was to be the start of my interest in physics simulation. It was probably a fitting start - a bug-filled project that went horribly wrong for unknown reasons.
This was an externally organised competition, so it worked a bit differently. The theme was announced in advance and we were allowed to work on games before the 48 hour period. There would be an extra element announced 48 hours before the deadline that we would have to include. This gave us time to discuss ideas, and one suggested was a game where you play as the mythical sea beast the Kraken, using the two analogue sticks of an Xbox controller to control tentacles and destroy passing ships.
I liked the idea, but wasn’t sure controlling a Kraken was feasible – tentacles are fairly deformable, and that’s always seemed quite complicated. So I made this prototype and decided that not only was it feasible, it was also damn cool.
Unfortunately, due to the competition being right in the middle of my exams, my participation in the competition itself was limited to porting my prototype to C# and helping to integrate it with the game.
I learnt an important lesson from this game: if there's some optional component that may or may not get included, you should design the game as though it will be.
Not particularly happy with the chosen theme of transport, we decided to integrate all five candidates for the theme into our game. The result was something that focused on pineapples perhaps a bit more than on transport.
For this competition, instead of having a preselected theme, we instead had to create a game suggested by the Random Video Game Name Generator.
Our potentially awesome deathmatch game with trampoline physics, however, was troubled by one elusive and far-reaching bug in the C++ library - a bug that wasn't found until weeks after the competition ended.
I wrote this to make writing games in Java easier.
This is a pretty powerful game library written for Warwick Game Design by Sam and Nick.