Category: Teaching

We were pleased to recently enjoy a visit from David King, a former University of Lincoln Games Computing student, who gave a presentation about his experiences within the game development industry. He talked about his role at Electronic Arts (EA), his experiences developing tools and how it feels to work in such a large organisation. Furthermore, he shared tips for students interested in getting into the games industry, and shared news of an exciting opportunity to work with him at EA.

Kindly, David agreed to share his slides with us, which should be visible below, or available here.

Cheers David!

“Just go make something. But really you want to do more than that. You want to create something, then you want to release it, you want feedback on it and you want to keep getting better.” – Chet Faliszek (Valve) to budding game developers.

Throughout their studies of becoming successful game-scholars, 1st year Games Computing students at the Lincoln School of Computer Science are being thought about game design tools to quickly develop and extend original game ideas into fully fledged playable games. The use of game developing challenges is one of our favourite approaches to the introductory of game studies. The rules of the challenge: Make a game based on a given theme, within the available time scale. Volunteering students present and discuss their game in front of a playful crowd made out of their colleagues and university staff members. The given theme for this challenge is “One Button Games” – games that use a range of mechanics based around the idea that a player may only use one button only. Such games are fairly popular amongst casual games such as “B.U.T.T.O.N“, “Super Action RPG” or “Canabalt“. Recently, Gamasutra wrote a rather extensive article about the game design recommendations for One Button Games.

We are very pleased to share with you some of the submissions for the 2012 One Button Game Challenge. Feel free to have a look at the video, download and play the games!

Furthermore you can find the results of the 2011 Game Challenges using the following links: One Button Challenge 2011 / ASCII Challenge 2011. Enjoy the games, and feel free to share them with your friends and family!

	Legend of Groomp by Alex Saye  (Contact) A tower defense game where you must defend against hordes of soldiers using up to nine different spells. Spells are cast by either tapping or holding the Space bar. Get experience by killing enemies to unlock more spells. Spells can be stacked on top of each other and combined – for instance, fire spreads easily to other enemies if used with the spell push! Download (PC Windows)
	Volley Orange by Jamie Bloor  (Contact) Collect all the gold apples using the oranges to proceed to the next level! Can you find the optimal way through all the levels? Download (PC Windows)
	Balloon Button by Mike Thompson (Contact) Control a hot air balloon through a vast and rich environment! Collect the sheep to get more points, and grab the fuel to fly even further! Download (PC Windows)

“What started as a group of students completely overestimating their skills at a GameJam is now a very ambitious team, eager to make their own fully developed video games.” – Martin Smith, Team Nigel’s Unity Developer.

Team Nigel is the mind child of four University of Lincoln Games Computing/Production students, after they worked together as a team throughout the ULCS Game Jam 2012 in late March earlier this year. Given 24 hours to make a game, they cobbled together Sheer Bloody Madness, which they describe as a “crazy Viking out for revenge in a mindless hack and slash adventure”. It won an honourable mention by the judges, which were made out of developers and academics from Crytek, RockStar, LiSC, ULCS and the LSoCS. Later, the game became the source of inspiration for Team Nigel’s current work, which has been codenamed Dugong.

Dugong is the current on-going project that Team Nigel came up with to introduce themselves into the world of video-games development. Since the ULCS GameJam 2012, they have made great progress and learned much about various aspects of making fun and entertaining video-games in a team-oriented environment. They describe their current game as following: You play a character (Called “You”) in ancient times whose village gets destroyed by evil forces. This incites You to go on a violent and revengeful rampage. The player controls the game character using typical third person views through a story-heavy hack & slash background.

When it comes to the design of the game, Team Nigel’s general approach is to throw anything at the project, as long as it’s considered as fun. Although the game relies heavily on a Viking background, they decided not to keep themselves bound to the typical Norsemen lore, but to let their imagination go out of control. Furthermore, magic plays a big part of the game, mastering the four elements is key to getting to the end areas. A currency dubbed “Wonga” is used to buy equipment, consumables or to play mini-games to earn more fame.

“We love open worlds, so our game will have exactly that”, says Martin, “We want to throw the player into a land that is full of stuff that lives and works without any player interaction, so they can explore them. Rewards, in form of additional items and insightful lore are given to explorers,  which can be used on their quest to go on. We’re using a very simplistic blocky graphical style for our game. We felt it’s much easier to work with blocks and pixels than it is to create full 3D characters and environments, although we are still debating on the overall style of the game as working with blocks isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to adding details!”

You can follow their progress at www.TeamNigel.co.uk which they update regularly.