Three Thing Game Rises Again

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Produced with the approval of Imperial Stormtroopers everywhere. 

Registration for the October incarnation of Three Thing Game is now open.  It starts on Monday 22nd of October with the "Amazing Thing Auction" with real fake money. Then on Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th we have the infamous 24 hour overnighter, this time with added Mono Game fun-ness.

The team from Mono Games will be on hand to help you port your game to Windows 8, and we will have some Windows 8 systems set up for testing. With a bit of luck you might win whatever big prize we can cobble together for the day, and perhaps win even bigger, by getting your game into the Windows 8 Store before anyone else.

If you are just a first year in our department you are welcome to come along. We will be running a special XNA sampler in the week before the competiton where we will give out some "skeleton code" that you can use to get started.

You can find the registration form here. Fill the form in, give it back to me, Rob Miles, with your registration fee and wait for the magic to happen. It's going to be fun. It always is.

If you have any "things" that you'd like to have included in the auction, put them into the comments on this post.

Three Thing Game for Autumn 2012

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The next Three Thing Game will be on the weekend of the 27th and 28th of October. The MonoGame team will be coming along to show us all how to take XNA games and run them on Windows 8 machines which will be fun.

We will be holding a Thing Auction in the week before the 24 hour session, with real fake money you can use to bid for things.  To find out more you can follow the Twitter feed for the events.

http://twitter.com/threethinggame

Joe’s team wins Competitors Prize

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Getting it going on

For this competition we introduced a new feature, the Three Thing Game “competitor’s prize”. This was voted for by teams who went round the entrants and checked out each other’s work. After going through the marksheets and totalling up the numbers I found that “The Infamous Two Sirs” had got the most points. However, they were happy that as winners of the main competition it was OK to let the second placed team, “Joe you’ve got it going on” have the prize. Thanks for that guys.

“Joe’s team” made good use of the Kinect sensor to produce a very interactive tower defence take on the words Fruitcake, Tower (I think – they got a wildcard) and Word processor. Well done guys, your signed Wipeout artwork awaits.

Three Thing Game Rocked

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These are all the survivors, given the HDR treatment. There’s a clean version on Flickr too, along with around 100 pictures taken during the event.

Yesterday was a great day. Everything was wonderful apart from the bit where I found nothing in my camera where a battery should be. However, thanks to a Sony Bloggie that I happened to have with me just in case of such stupidity, we managed to get videos of all the teams and their games. At the moment I’m transcoding them as fast as I can and putting them on YouTube. Search for the tag threethinggamemarch2012 if you want to see them. The rest of the videos will be up tomorrow.

A huge vote of thanks to Dave G, for making the lab available and being there to make it work, Adam for tech support, Martin for night watchman duty, Warren, Derek, Kevin, David M, Simon and Stuart for judging support, Jackie for sorting out the Sony connection, Mark for sorting the food and David P for turning up to provide support.

And kudos to the students for making the best games we’ve ever seen at Three Thing Game. We had some great stuff shown off this time.  And here is the winners roll.

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Winners: “The Infamous Two Sirs” Christophe and Rob with “Pocket Starlight” which took “Boy, Contraption and High-Jump” to altogether another level.

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Second place: “Run Dead Studios” Russell, Alex and Jon took “Sheep, Fireworks and High dive” and made “Shear Carnage” for Windows Phone. That really should be in the Marketplace by, say, last week.

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Third Place: “BRB”, Alexsejs,     Arturs,   Nataloya, and Paul managed to work the Olympics into a snazzy spaceship shooter from the words “Alien, Spaceship and ‘at night’”. Again, that should be on your Windows Phone real soon.

One more prize to go, the “People’s Choice” award that was judged by the teams themselves. I’ll have the results of this tomorrow, when I’ve finished crunching the numbers.

Some tips for next time:

Just about everybody grasped the “simple is good” principle. Lots of teams got something working and then added to it. Others weren’t afraid to drop complication to get things going. After all, if the player doesn’t know that the original gameplay design included rabbits with laser eyes they are not going to miss them if they get dropped. This is the single most important factor in success. Having lots of ideas is great. Feeling you have to make them all work and put them in version 1 is not. Keep a “book of features” and write them all down. Then put them in order of implementation and work your way through.

The next most important thing is to make a proper game. What you make should be like a story. It should have have a beginning, a middle and an end. Don’t just make the middle bit, that’s a tech demo. Figure out how you sent the scene, what the player does in gameplay and how they fail/succeed. And put all this in. It is better to have a game that goes all the way to “Game Over” than adding extra features to the middle bit but never let it end.

Make it social. Some games let the players put their scores on Facebook. Bragging rights are big. And sometimes much easier to add than you might think (step forwards Windows Phone).

When you come to present your results don’t spread the blame. Don’t blame Fred for baling and leaving you with no graphics. The judges don’t want to hear your problems. Never say you ran out of time. It just makes you sound like a bad planner and the judges know that you had just as much time as everyone else.  If you must mention something that isn’t how you wanted it to be, talk about future plans and developments in a positive light.

Whatever you did, get something out there. Blog screenshots, put games in Windows Phone Marketplace or wherever you can. Just about everything I saw over the weekend had potential. Make sure you show your stuff off. It can only do you favours.

And, and this is the most important bit, Have Fun. Lots of people did, and that’s why they’ll be back next time. And do even better.

Getting Going

The competition started today. From 10:30 we had a stream of students turning up and getting going. Once things had settled down I went for a wander with the camera.

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None of these images are covered by copyright. Probably.

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Concentration

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One of these people is French. Can you spot which one?

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Happy codingP1030544

Scary happy coding

..there are loads more pictures on Flickr. Take a look here.

Three Thing Game Auction

Teams and Words

These are the teams with the things that they bought.

Three Thing Game March 2012 is rolling. We have 33 teams (yes, 33!) with a total of 111 students taking part. Today we gave each team their Three Things to work with. Actually we didn’t just give them out. We sold them. Each team had 530 “Bank of Thingland” pounds to bid for things. If a lot came up that they fancied they could make a bid for it. We had to auction 99 things in 50 minutes, and we just about made it. Tremendous fun. The development starts now, with the 24 hour game development running over Saturday night.

Worthless Money

Worthless Cash to spend on Things.

October Three Thing Game Winners

Survivors
These folks are the true survivors.
Well, we lost a few on the way. The effects of fatigue and the lure of Halloween parties meant that some of our teams didn’t make it to the finish line. However, a good time was had by all and I’ve never seen so much pizza eaten by so many so quickly. The pizza company had to send two cars to deliver all 40. And it all got eaten…

This morning at 7:30 Simon and I went around with a camera and got presentations from all the teams of their games. The videos will be up tomorrow so you can see for yourself how just how good they are. We had some especially impressive solutions from First Year teams who, with only five or so weeks of C# under their belt, produced some highly playable results. Then, at 9:00 sharp the three judges, Warren, Neil and Simon watched the top ten teams and picked the winners. Which was so difficult we had to award two second prizes.

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Judges and videos

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You’d think they’d look pleased with prizes of this quality….

This is the team that won the award for best interpretation of their Three Things.  “Tactical Nuclear Penguins”, made up of Josh Crowther, Alex Beamer and Dan Burns had to make something from “Funky, Robot, goes underground”. And make something they did. An underground exploring robot agent working down through caverns to fight the devil no less. Hooked up with great dance move beat matching action and coming to Windows Phone Marketplace near you soon.

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The first Second Place team, if you see what I mean, “The Double A's”. Anthony Quinn and Aaron Ridge produced a fast moving, pretty much market ready for Windows Phone take on “Extreme Hamster in a Graveyard”. Great work, even if they couldn’t keep their eyes open at the end.

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This is the second, Second Placed, team. “I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3” , aka Lindsay Cox, Devon Hansen, David Hart and Michael Bumby. Their game based on “Gun-toting, Volcano, in Space” combined Bejewelled style action with a sideways blast-em-up which had the player matching threes to arm Space Marines attacking the Volcano.  Lots of guns, and lots of toting.  Great work guys. And don’t worry, we’ll have Lego prizes for all of you once we’ve been down to ToysRUs.

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The Winners, with their prizes.

The Winners were praised by the judges for producing a game for Windows Phone that was good enough to sell right now, with delightful graphics, a well honed mechanic and good adherence to the theme. And you could slice the moon in half. These guys are making a bit of a habit of winning,  having nabbed the prizes in the last competition too. “The Infamous Two Sirs”, Christophe Lionet and Robert Marshall produced a game based on “Tomb, Ninja, Travelodge” that looks excellent and plays great. Well done guys.

The next Three Thing Game will be on the weekend of 17th and 18th March 2012. Start planning now.

Three Thing Game Gets Cracking

Three Thing Game Starts

This is most of the students at the start, lets see how many are left at the end.

We got cracking with Three Thing Game this morning. Great things are being done, or at least thought about. Just about everyone has turned up, which means that we have around 100 students in the department for 24 hours or so, trying to finish off a game.

There are loads of pictures on Flickr, some of them even have captions. Find them here.

XNA Session Content

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You can find the content from the XNA session (along with lots of other stuff) here:

/demos

Here are links to the code we developed in the session, plus a bonus “coloured cloud” version.

The presentation was firsts given at Mix 11 in Las Vegas earlier this year. You can find a video of the presentation here.

You can get a free XNA book from here.

About Three Thing Game

Class of Three Thing Game October 2012

Three Thing Game is a student development competition that we run in the department. It originated with an exercise in 2010 called Destruction Golf in which a number of student teams had a week to create a game. We ended the week with a 24 hour development session where the games were finished and a winner judged. The event was the basis of a really good article in 360 magazine. You can find out more here.

We give each team of students three “things” around which they can base a game. The things are suggested on the web site in the weeks leading up to the event. We have students from all years taking part, in the October 2011 event we have around half the teams from the first year. The competition is as much about project management and planning as it is about game design, coding and assets. An approach based on getting something working and then iteratively adding features has been found to be much more successful than those based around a “grand plan” with lots of “great ideas”.

You can keep coming back to this site to find out more about the competition, and how the teams are doing.

Three Thing Game “Things” Picked

[Warning: this is a graphics heavy post. But worth it]

Thing Envelopes

These are the things, who knows what magic they hold.

Three Thing Game October 2011 started today. We have 25 teams and 75 things to give out.  So let’s get on with it.

Ergo Studios 

Ergo Studios: Scott Smith, John Firmin and William Mason
”Giant Sniper of Doom”

Tactical Nuclear Penguins 

Tactical Nuclear Penguins: Josh Crowther, Alex Beamer and Dan Burns
”Funky Robot goes underground” 

I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3

I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3: Lindsay Cox, Devon Hansen, David Hart and Michael Bumby
”Gun toting volcano in space”

Double As

Double A's: Anthony Quinn and Aaron Ridge
”Extreme hamster in the graveyard”

Bottled Games

Bottled Games: Steve Muir, Leigh Boynton, Simon Johnston and Marc Cutsforth
”Fairground mouse jungle quest”

ALE

ALE: Ermin Huremovic, Luke Young, Anthony Church and Adrian Smith
”Jelly werewolf ghost story”

Drop Table Team

Drop Table Team;: 'Tom Forbes, Joe Smith, Ben Coveney and Mat Bajer
”Skateboarding Chicken Hospital”

Team Thunderhead

Team Thunderhead: Toby Russell, Rob Bedding, Jonathon Rich and Tom Proctor
”Skeleton Fridge at School”

The Honey Badgers

The Honey Badgers: Keelan Jenkinson, Jacob North, Scott Sanderson and Bektas Ozer
”Alien Dog with a Banjo”

Smoking Hash Tables

Smoking Hashtables: Sam Cutler, Dan Endersby, Louis Deane and Alex Mann
”Bearded Frankenstein Fighter”

Aeonian Arts

Aeonian Arts: Arron Martin, Willliam Grey, Sam Healand and Caine Martin
”Faster than Light  Zombie Desktop”

The Four Horsemen

The Four Horsemen: Nick Case, Alex Hatton, James Czerwitt-Hampshire and Mark Dyer
”Heatseeking Vampire of Stealth”

Fez Productions

Fez Productions: Heather MacDougal, Thomas McPherson, Matthew Narey and  Miles McGann
”Reality TV Star Pies Crypt”

Rage Against the Turing Machine

Rage Against the Turing Machine: James Taylor, Joe Wilson, Dominic Rihaldi and Josh Twigg
”Spandex Banker Overkill”

The Unlikely Alliance

The Unlikely Alliance: Scott Neil, Daniel Karkin, Waseem Akhtar and Alex Pringle
”Summoner Bomb Speedboat”

The Infamous Two Sirs

The Infamous Two Sirs: Christophe Lionet and Robert Marshall
”Tomb Ninja Travelodge”

Troll

Troll: Robert Campbell, Tim Chadwick, Lawrence Worrell and Samantha Henstock
”Bungalow Dragon of Death”

Whats That Coming Over the Hill

What's That Coming Over the Hill: Joshua Moon, Andrew Flatters, Abdul Muzammil and Emily Bradshaw
”Cheese Penguin Apocalypse”

Vapour

Vapour: Johannes Van Rig, Ben Outram, Steven Bul and lTom Kingston
”Magic Mum Comic”

4Play

4Play: Alex Chard, Sam Harrison, Shuef Khan and Niall Hammond-Blackburn
”Disco Killer Doodle”

Ad-Hoc Productions

Ad-Hoc Productions: William Dann, David Armstrong, Nathan Hickling and Katherine Fielding
”Orchestral Assassin  Butcher”

Team Awesome

Team Awesome: Stephen Foster, Sean Mackan, Callum Elshout and Danny Alan
”Frankfurter  Badger  Canal

Scribble

Scribble: Alex Tanser, Luke Harrington, Steve Davis and Ben Allison
”Curry Dinosaur City”

Nerdtacular

Nerd-Tacular: Grant Lodge, Codie Collinge, James Croft and Tim Roth
”Long haired mummy on safari”

Jaybodanto

Jaybodanto: Jamie Crossman, Robert Bailey, Thomas Smith and Daniel Moorhouse
”Galactic Vegetable Dragon”

Three Thing Game Rides Again

We are running another Three Thing Game development at the end of October. These are open to any Hull University students who fancy having a go at some intense game development.

The "things" will be assigned to the teams on Monday 24th of October, with an overnight development session from 29th to 30th of October. We even get an extra hour thanks to the move from BST to GMT, which might prove crucial.

Registration is open now, you can find a registration form here.

We are searching out some bumper prizes for the winning team.

We are also looking for “things” that we can use for the games. Please append any thing ideas that you have to this post. Each team gets three "things" that they have to base their game on. Last time the winners got "Warrior Koalas on Mars". Who knows what the future will bring....

Three Thing Game Judging Videos

Platform Expo

If you want to see what the teams came up with at the end of the game event, and how well students can function after sleep deprivation and lots of caffeine and sugar, then they are all now available on youtube. Just search for threethinggame These videos are in High Definition, as I’m sure you will spot.

We had Paul Ross from Criterion Games here today (they are the studio behind titles such as Burnout) to give a talk on game development and chat with our students. This was the cue for lots of scrambling for Windows Phone devices so that some of our team members could show him the things they had made during the competition. By all accounts he was very impressed, which is nice.

Anyone who missed out on taking part in the competition this time round needn’t worry. Three Thing Game will be back next semester.

Three Thing Game Judging at Platform Expo

Three Thing Game Finals 
Yours truly with “To Be Confirmed”, whose take on “Warrior Koalas on Mars” got them a Windows Phone each. Good work guys. Now put it in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

We put 60 or so bleary eyed students on a double decker bus and drove them down to Platform Expo for the judging.

Three Thing Game Finals

They must be judges, they’ve got clipboards…

All the group watched the judging videos (which will be online soon) and asked a bunch of questions about the entries.  At noon we announced the winners. The students then had an hour or so to explore the expo (or collapse somewhere) and then the trusty bus brought them back to campus.

Every team stayed the course this time, and we had playable content from all of them. Some of the teams did amazing things with some truly tricky starting points and they stuck to their subjects really well. I’m terrifically impressed with all the students, who served as ambassadors for the university at every level. We even had a bunch of volunteers who had given up a chunk of their Sunday to come and demonstrate the 3DS to people at the expo.

Jon and I did talks about 3D displays and Kinect that were well received and well attended (although I’m not sure how coherent we were only having had 3 hours sleep in the last 36).

Great fun, if exhausting. I’ve put a load of pictures up on Flickr (search for the tag threethinggame) and I’ll be uploading the judging videos on Monday.

Three Thing Game Team Videos

I’ve been round all the teams and done brief videos of how they are getting on:

Awesome Source

 

Bi Winning
Blank
Bottled Games
Brayshaw’s Bandits

CMYK

E for idiots

Fez Productions

Fresh Pot

Left 4 Dev

Pixel Bomb

So Fear

To Be Confirmed

Troll

Two and a Half Life

I’ve also put captions on the pictures on Flickr..

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=threethinggame

I’ll do this all again later tonight, and see what progress we’ve made.

Three Thing Game Gets Going

Three Thing Games Teams

These are the teams at the start of the competition. I’ll do another of everyone at the end…..

Three Thing Game Prizes

Awesome prizes, I think this explains the good turnout.

We’ve launched the game development competition today. We have over 60 students involved.  They are all busily in the development phase of their games at the moment, just a few hours left now…..

If you want to see what they are up to we have a variety of webcam feeds for you to choose from:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/twenty-four-hour-game-dev

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/24-hour-game-dev

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fresh-pot

I’m putting regular picture updates on Flickr and there will be videos later when I’ve been round and chatted to all the teams. And everyone is tweeting as well. The tag threethinggame will get you where you want to be.

Competition Starts

The Three Thing Game started today, with each team getting its three things. This is the bottom of a “Thing Pot”.

ThingPot

Here are the teams, with their names and their “Things” (Note that the names are not actually in the order of the members and not all the members are in all the pictures. But hey, they are in colour)

Two and a Half Life

Two and a Half Life:   Codie Collinge,   James Croft,   Grant Lodge,   Tim Roth, Katherine Fielding

Things: Underwater Sea-Badger of Doom  

Troll

Troll:   Timothy J Chadwick,   Robert Campbell,   Oliver Moore,   Lawrence Worrell

Things: Werewolf Demons Racing

To Be Confirmed

To Be Confirmed:   Christophe Lionet,   Rob Marshal,   Kristian Fenn

Things: Warrior Koalas on Mars

So Fear

So Fear:   Roger Pujol-Serra,   Nuno R Pombares Leiria,   Mehul Shukla, Mario Lopez Mompean

  Things: Kitchen Dragon Duel

Pixel Bomb

Pixel Bomb:   Benjamin Stephenson,   Andrew Roscoe,   James Wright,  Joel Parky, Alistair Robinson

Things: Gambling Screwdriver on the run

Left 4 Dev

Left 4 Dev:   Peter Brooksbank,   Craig Holland,   John Dixon,   Matthew Taylor

Things: Sheep Bee Romance

Fresh Pot

Fresh Pot:   Cameron Wilby,   Jack Thorpe,   Jake Stirling,   Jonathon Niland

Things: Bedroom Steam Explosion

Fez Productions

Fez Productions:   Shane Morley,   Miles McGowan,   Thomas McPherson,   Heather MacDougal

Things: Alien Pot Noodle Vengance

E for Idiots

E for Idiots:   Allen Anderson,   Michael Clayton,   Alex Bell,   Joe Axon

Things: Cookie Detective Gardening

CMYK

CMYK:   Karen Fielding,   Nathan Hickling,   Willian Dann,   David Armstrong,   Willian Hunter

Things: Singing Cogs Fencing

Brayshaws Bandits

Brayshaws Bandits:   Sam Cutler,   Joe Appleyard,   Louis Deane,   Dan Endersley

Things: Medieval Robot Killer

Bottled Games

Bottled Games:   Stephen Muir,   Marc Cutsforth,   Simon Johnson,   Leigh Boynton,   Richard Sharp

Things: Vampire Electric TV Show

Blank

Blank:   Rory Spencer,   Joe Stead,   Jack Middleton,   Michael Dean

Things: Spanish Kumquat Bike Ride

Bi Winning

Bi-Winning:   Denis Craig,   James Taylor,   Josh Twigg,   Joe Wilson

Things: Ninja Chickens Painting

Awesome Source

Awesome Source:   Josh Crowther,   Alex Beamer,   Matthew Narey,   George Harnwell

Things: School Cheese Escape

gotoandgame

Special Guest team from Hull School of Art and Design – great to see you folks.

gotoAndGame: Matthew Hardiman, Stephen Conlan, Paul Starkey, Arron Foxley, Claire Anthony

Things: Zombie Vegetable on Holiday