Programming, cotainers and games

Hello Again.
Sorry for the period of silence for me, but things has been getting in the way for me. Anyway, lets talk a bit about the programing course. In the course, we have two assignments that needs to be done before the end of the course

Assignment 1

The first assignment is to write three different container classes, classes that can store several other objects, and run tests on them. The first test is to see if the classes works properly, which our teacher has provided us code with. The second test is to read a couple of numbers from a file, insert them into the containers and then go through the container to see what numbers are missing, and insert them manually into the container. And we are going to clock how long time this takes for each container, and write a report about it.

The three types of containers that we should write are a linked list, a dynamic array and a binary search tree. I'm more or less finished with the former two, have some minor changes that needs to be done to them and then run them through our teacher's test. I have a bit left to do on the binary search tree, but it's nearing competition as well.

This assignment is good in the regard that it will show us that different containers are useful for different purposes.

Assignment 2

Our second assignment, that we got to know of today, is to write a simple game of our choice (in C++) and write a report of our choice. There is one twist to all of this however; in the code, we need to implement a couple of things. I'm not going to go through all of them, but it's various ways that you can design your code in.

I've written games before during my studies, so I'm not expecting any major challenges since we can write a simple, arcade game for this course. Currently, I'm leaning toward that I will do a Snake game. I haven't done it before, but I have ideas of how to solve things inside the game, so once I can get started, it should be that big of an issue.

Advanced Game Design Postmortem

My groups and my personal postmortem for the course in Advanced Game is now available on our group's wiki.
My individual postmortem
The group's postmortem

Board Game Progress Report (Advanced Game Design) - The End

Yesterday, we presented the final game that we came up with for the other groups and some staff at Campus Gotland. Below are some of the changes that was made to the final version of the game.

In addition to a slightly reworked board, there are also a few tiles on the board that only the monster can move on (marked green on the image below). The reason for adding those tiles is because we thought that the monster needed to get stronger in some way. We tried and solve this by having the monster rolling one or two D8 instead of D6 as the players. This made the monster to powerful however, so it was scrapped. What we instead came up with was a few shortcuts that only the monster could use, to improve it's movement somewhat. This also increases the risk for players searching the small rooms (marked 60 and 168 on the image below), as they can now "get attacked" from two sides. However, searching the small rooms gives the players two wand cards instead of one.







































Aside from the new board, the only thing that was added was the name of the game, which we decided to call ShadowPath. Now all that is left is to write a postmortem of the game and hand it in on Friday. Then this course is over and I start new courses in math and programming, my two favorite subjects!

GAMEX 2013 Report - Other Higher Educations

Uppsala University Campus Gotland where not the only high education seat that was present at the expo. Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Blekinge Institute of Technology) and Högskolan i Skövde (Skövde University) were also present at Gamex with their game educations.

Even though I did not manage to get much good images from Skövde's booth, I still managed to get the image below from the game Grief. The game is also made with the multimedia library SFML, which is what we learned to program with last spring at Gotland University, so it's nice to see that we have some similarities in our education. However, one big difference from Gotland is the size of the team. As I managed to learn at an after-party we game educations had on the Saturday, apparently 15 people had been working on Grief. And I thought that my group of 8 persons was big... I didn't get a chance to try Grief, but it is an platform game where the main character (a child) has lost his father in cancer and he's going through the five stages of grief. It looks really nice from what I managed to see, but as I said, I didn't get a chance to try the game.

I would like to see more than one game from Skövde though. I'm fully aware of that it may be so because they had a smaller booth compared to Campus Gotland and because of other factors, but if you really want to show of what you can do at your education, don't just bring one game. For example Coffee Stain Studios, the creators behind the game Sanctum is originally from Skövde, so it's not like Skövde doesn't create good games.




















Grief

Blekinge had a bit more to show in their booth. One game that they showed was Epigenesis (who's art-style is clearly inspired by the game Sanctum). I would describe it as handball meets FPS meets base-conquering. That's what the game is about, the game is a FPS where your team can win in two ways. Either by taking over all the bases on the level before the time runs out or by having scored the most points at the end of the round. When you are carrying the ball, you cannot use any weapons.

Epigenesis

The version of Epigenesis that I tried at Gamex was an alpha build, so it will certainly improve as development goes along. My thoughts about the game was that  the concept was an interesting one, but some things in the game wasn't  100% clear. For example, I didn't know you could win the game by taking over all the bases on the map, I played the game as you could only win by scoring the most points. But once again, it was an alpha build, and I'm sure that it will improve later on.

Other than that, they showed an point-and-click game that was intended as an art-prototype. The art was nice, but otherwise I don't know what so say about the game since I don't play many point-and-click games. They also showed some interesting technology, where they had done a plug-in to a 3D-program called Maya that enabled them to see how the models was going to look inside the game engine that they had. Really cool idea if you ask me.

GAMEX 2013 Report - Campus Gotland [UPDATED]

The 2013 edition of the Swedish gaming expo Gamex is now over. I was attending the expo during it's first three days, and in the following posts, I'll write about some thoughts about the expo and such. The first will be about Campus Gotland's Presence at the expo. More posts in the coming days

The games that Campus Gotland was showing on the floor this year was CoBots, Fly or Die, King of the Thrill, Little Warlock, Lunar Love, Secrets of Grindea and Tribal Marathon. Various staff was also present to answer any questions that the visitors had. CoBots was also shown in the "Indie-Corner" at Gamex.

As I was attending Gamex on my own and not as a part of Campus Gotland this year, I didn't spend my entire time at their booth, but from what I saw and what the persons at Campus Gotland told me, people seemed to like the games that was made by the students overall, especially since four of the seven projects was made by first year students .

Nördigt, a Swedish podcast I'm listening to did record a live-episode during the Saturday of the expo (which I attended). During the episode, they praised two first-year projects made by students at Campus Gotland. CoBots were praised as one of the few games where you could play together with a friend, as they thought that most of the games at the expo could only be played single-player. King of the Thrill was praised for it's technology, where you could use your own smart-phone as the controller for the game.

Direct link to the episode they recorded under Games (in Swedish)

Below are images that  I took of Campus Gotland's booth (and some from indie booth for CoBots).

L-to-R: Waiting lobby for Fly or Die, Little Warlock, Promotion for Cobots

 Some of the staff from Campus Gotland + Petra from the team behind CoBots

 CoBots at the Indie Corner at Gamex

Gaming journalists Mats Nylund and Tove Bengtsson from Nördigt testing CoBots

People testing Fly or Die and Tribal Marathon

TECHNOLOGY