That was completely exhausting. I don't know how teachers keep up with their kids. But, having worked with the kids for a day, I can see why they keep trying.
We had around sixty kids in our Fenner Computer Suite, wrestling with Python programming and writing games. And it was wonderful. I took a bunch of pictures of the teams and whatnot, you can find them on Flickr, search for here. After some frantic judging of everyone and presentations from the top six teams we managed to come up with some winners.
Many thanks to ebuyer for providing some top notch prizes. Each of the top teams got a mini-quadcopter and the special award winners got phone controlled desktop robots. The first prize team also got a set of coveted ebuyer mugs.
First Prize went to the Headlands Blue team whose "Bleeding Gums Teddy Invasion" game had the player as a monkey frantically grabbing bananas to fling at the approaching evil teddy who was bent on stealing the saxophone.
Great use of the mouse and keyboard controls, along with a continuously advancing teddy in a hat made for action packed gameplay.
Second Prize went to Team #Ultimate from Wawne Primary school. The judges were very impressed on the way that the two-player dynamic had been harnessed to make an exiting game.
Voldemort Chase pitted a little pony and grandad in a race to see who could capture the Voldemort and Harry characters. Get as many as you can before the time runs out, but don't get the wrong type, as this could send your scores negative.
Third Prize went to the Cottingham High School "Bremk" team with a compulsive maze based chasing game that had a great "Just one more go feel" to it.
Avoid the sticky tar walls and steer teddy around the maze to make it to the exit and avoid the assassin.
Cottingham Gold have a second reason to celebrate (and will be getting another prize) as they were also selected as winners of the "People's Choice" award. We set up a survey and teams were encouraged to spend some time looking at the other entries and marking them using exactly the same criteria as the judges. And the team from Cottingham can be very proud of their twin successes.
The judges also wanted to make some special presentations to the games that they saw that had that certain extra something. Here are the judges special award winners.
Headlands Red - Best Hand-drawn Artwork
This team had worked hard to create all the assets for the game that they made. And it showed.
A scary volcanic backdrop to a game that has you taking the role of Voldemort steering a path around attacking dragons and lava fireballs.
Team Reptile from Cottingham High school won a special award for best use of popular culture in a game.
In this strongly contemporary game you have to guide the kitten away from the attentions of a hungry and famous footballer. Scary stuff, and bad news for the kitten if it gets caught....
This is team CodeCrackers from Beverley High School, who created what the judges considered the "most complete" game. There is a sad story here though, in that they kept their game on a single memory stick which failed just before the final presentations. Fortunately, thanks to the foresight of their teacher, who had taken a video of the game in action, the judges were able to see how well the game worked, and give due credit.
In this game you are the hamster, and lunch is on the agenda.
You need to collect the ingredients and get yourself something to eat.
Next time the team has promised that they will take regular backups of their game code as they go along, one more professional lesson learned I reckon.
Physics based gaming with spoons and pinballs won the "Awesome Foursome" from Hull Trinity College a special award for great use of scientific principles in a game.
There is only one path to the pan, and you have to find it by carefully guiding your pinball from spoon to spoon. One mistake and the realistic physics model sends you right back to the start.
We need to give a special thanks to all the judges who are, from left to right, Lindsay West from Platform Expos, Warren Viant from Computer Science, Duncan Mulholland from Gateway Interactive, Keven Elner from Computer Science and Danny Young from ebuyer. Seated at the desk is Simon Grey, also from Computer Science. The judges had to work really hard and did a fantastic job.
We also need to mention the Seed Interns from seedSoftware, who took a day off from writing software for things like fire incident control systems to help with some much more tricky problems.. Thanks for your help folks, we could not have done it without you.
At the end everyone got to take a departmental mug home.
Not all the games have to involve cheese and crackers, although if they did the sample project we've given out would be even more useful......
Next week we are taking Three Thing Game in a new direction. There'll still be three things, and a game, but we won't have students writing games. Instead we've got teams from seven local schools coming into the university for a one day Three Thing Game@School event.
Teams will be writing games using the Pygame framework, based on content taught to their teachers in the Wrestling With Python courses that we have been running since last October.
Each school has been given a set of things for their teams to choose from and on Tuesday 15th of July they'll be coming into the university to sit down at a machine in one of our computer suites and make it happen. We've got judges from the games industry and sponsorship from ebuyer, along with special breakout sessions if the coding pressure gets too much...
By the end of the event we had 7 teams who finished up with demonstrable games. And by that I mean proper games. With a beginning, middle and end. And artwork and sound effects. Amazing, and in just about a day. Simon and Kevin wandered around judging and I followed with a wobbly camera. You can see the results here:
Top down fighting action here, with a "Bitmap Brothers" feel to the graphics and the things "Butler", "Ninja" and "Attack" being put to good use. Different styles of ninja and a scrollable level system kept the action going, as the hapless butler fends off wave after wave of bad guys.
Highly commended by the judges, this neat space shooter was formed from the things Hand Grenade, Ring of Power and Spacecraft. With two distinct game modes and an awesome looking 3D cityscape this was as good to watch as it was to play.
An entry that was highly commended by the judges. Start from "Mayhem", "Puzzler" and "Of Fun" they crafted a neat space flying game where the player has to find linked gems in a puzzle in order to keep flying through space. The mayhem mode effects looked a lot like the movie "Gravity", but with more moving bits and bobs.
24 hours to make an Occulus Rift game from scratch. Why not. Or y! Anyhoo, from "Gentleman Thief", "Screwdriver" and" Inventor" the team made an immersive exploration game where you go in search of a screwdriver within a 3d rendered environment. And it worked
With a team name that sounds like three things, but isn't, this bunch had a lot of fun with Anti-aircraft gun, Liner and Zeus. What we got was an action packed sideways scroller with myriads of weapon modes and boss levels. Great fun to play and some lovely graphical touches.
Maze based dungeon bashing with a twist form Floating Goats. From Apocalypse, Downstairs and Locked the team crafted a succession of fighting arenas where the key to moving on is killing everything else. With some neat graphical touches, a splendid piece of work. Oh, and the twist.
This gained first place in the competition, and rightly so. There are some lovely touches, like the way that the tower "dings" when it is hit. The three words that they had, by the way, were Eiffel Tower, Flying Fish and Undersea. And all in around 24 hours. Magic.
The standard was astonishing. The winners were 1.21 Gigabytes,
The judges also highly commended these two teams.
BetaJester made not one, but two different and attractive games, both of which stuck closely to their theme.
Rusty Spoons ended their TTG career with something rather special that I really hope makes it into the marketplace.
It really was a fantastic occasion. Thanks to Dave for letting us play with his lab, Simon and Kevin for Judging, David, Simon and Martin for running the night shift, John for dropping round from C4DI and kudos to all the folks that took part. And book now for Three Thing Game Autumn, running from 31st October to 1st November.
Three Thing Game Summer 2014 starts tomorrow, Thursday 12th of June. We will be holding the Thing Auction in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building.
Doors open at 1:00 pm, when teams can collect their team packs and "Bank of Thingland" money and the auction itself starts at 1:15 pm.
To help you plan for the event, here is a list of all the things in the auction. There may be some "special guest things" in addition to the words on the list. These will be inserted at random during the auction. The things will be auctioned in alphabetical order. And here they are:
Adventure, Alien, Anti-aircraft gun, Apocalypse, Assassin, At the Circus, Attack, Balloon, Banjo, Box of tricks, Bread, Butler, Cheese sandwich, Crying baby, Cube, Diploma, Downstairs, Drainpipe, Dressing Up, Eiffel Tower, Electric, Enormous Hat, Enormous Pie, Fan, Fishing, Flying Fish, Fruit, Frying Pan, Gems, Gentleman Thief, Going Downhill, Gong, Hairy Arms, Hand grenade, Hunting, Inventor, Last Bus Home, Locked, Mayhem, Ninja, Ocean Liner, Of Fun, Pirate, Puzzler, Ring of Power, Robot, Rubber, Screwdriver, Shop, Slippery, Spacecraft, String Vest, Tidal Barrier, Triangles, Undersea, University , Violin of Doom, Wearing a Boiler Suit, Wombat, Yeti, Zeus, Zombie.
You can bid for any item that comes up. If you run out of money you will get your missing things from the "unwanted things" pile that nobody has bid for.
Three Thing Game is happening again. Of course. We are doing things a little differently from last November, but a little similarly to May last year (if you see what I mean). The competition will run from Thursday 12th of June to Friday 13th of June, during the final week of the semester.
We'll have all the usual shenanigans, with a Thing Auction at 1:00 on Thursday 12th of June (in LTA) , a Summer Bash on Thursday night and a star studded presentation event in the same place on Friday evening. As long as we can find some stars. And some studs.
Well, after a day of solid development we had our finals. I’d expected some attrition, particularly as the event came on the end of a tough day in a tough teaching week, but at the end we had 25 teams ready to be judged and so our three teams of judges sallied forth into the fray. They were looking for adherence to the theme of the three things, presentation quality and plain good old playability. After they had seen their assigned teams they each came back with three entries worthy of a finalist place. So we headed to the lecture theatre, fired up the Surface and gave each team three minutes to pitch their game to the whole audience.
First up was “Two Thing Game”: Episode 2”, otherwise known as Mateusz Bajer and Ben Convenley. They had taken “Super Saiyan”, “Hamster” and “Water Fight” and fashioned an island defence game, with you as the Saiyan in the title beating off hoards of hamsters intent on stealing your water. Above you can see the “Boss Hamster” about to enter the fray. Proper hamster blasting fun.
The second team to present had the best name I reckon. “The Bing Wang Theory”, Adam Brooks, James Britta, Alex Belezjaks and Artur Neugodnikovs had made a Windows Phone game out of "Radioactive", "Spider" and "Racing". The game had you tipping the phone to dodge the radioactive bullets hurtling towards you, while trying to create chains of colour in the bullet stream that would change them into harmless isotopes. A nice balance of challenges in a single game that made really good use of the accelerometer and touch screen on the phone. They even had a back story in rhyme. I hope this one makes it into Windows Phone Marketplace.
Next up was “Teams are for losers, and so are graphics”. This was a one man team who did everything with ASCII characters. Living up to the name in the most literal manner possible. William Grey had fashioned an entirely text powered RPG around the things “Pork”,”Crates” and “Light Cycles”. After a slight hiccup at the start due to the fact that the demonstration machine lacked a numeric keypad, William was able to show how to move around the environment searching for crates containing the life-enhancing bacon.
The next team to present were Spooky Elephant. To my eternal shame I was so caught up in the excitement of seeing the team I was kind of part of present at finalist level that I neglected to take any pictures of the presentation. Still, the team of Simon Grey, David Parker, David Miles, Lewis Jackson and others had produced a very playable game from a starting point of “Walrus”, “Swimming” and “Custard”. Above you can see Wilbur the Walrus being steered away from the impending custard tsunami.
The “Rusty Spoons” are a Three Thing Game institution. Thomas McPherson,
Tim Roth and
Matthew Narey have been involved since the very first competition, many years ago. As befits experienced developers they had created a stunning looking tower defence game from “Clouds”, “
Ship” and “
under attack”. The player has to stop the ships getting through bye using clouds to generate wind, whirlpools and all manner of bad things.
This was the first Three Thing Game for the Grant C team. But Matt Jemmett,
Matt Rose,
Luke Stewart and
Jordan Tavaglione put on a great show with their take on “Sidescroller, “Marvel” and “Zombie”. With guest appearances from Iron Man and a zombified Hulk, the game had frantic shooting action as the player tried to stop the hulks from passing. This game also featured custom recorded voice acting and “Rob Miles” bullets. Can’t be bad.
This team, the Cunning Stunts (careful how you say that) had made a game called “FlusterCluck” (careful how you say that too) starting from “Jetpack”, “sponge” and “chicken”. The chicken is the good guy, the sponges spawn at an amazing rate and after a few seconds things get very flustered indeed. Very good work from Jamie Hickman, Tom Richardson and Ricardo Real.
Betajester are another team of Three Thing Game stallwarts. And they used the skills they have acquired over the years to produce a frantic top down maze game from “Lasers”, “Trap” and “At Midnight”. We could see the traps, and the lasers, But we weren’t quite sure where the Midnight element fitted in. Then the clock clicked over, the screen went dark, the bad guys appeared and the whole game went manic. Great atmospheric fun (and good use of shaders) from Adam Boyne, Josh Porter and
Ryan Lay.
Team “88 Rob Miles Per Hour” are new to the department this year, and had the less than welcoming trio of “Database”, “Speed” and “goes fishing” as their things. But Daniel Pearson, Ben Redpath, Daniel Szczech and Chris Cawkwell stayed true to their theme and game up with a game that had you catching fish, measuring them and then entering the details into a database. All great fun and the best interpretation of things that I’ve seen in a long while.
So, after all nine had presented we got to the prizes. These three stayed around long enough to pick up their Third Place prizes. Well done to “88 Rob Miles Per Hour”. Their quirky gameplay and strict adherence to them got them into third.
The “Rusty Spoons” stunning graphics and neat gameplay got them into Second Place.
Which left Betajester as the overall winners this time. They hit the theme well with an excellent piece of gameplay presentation with genuinely scary elements. Fantastic stuff.
One of the judges remarked on me that the standard gets higher each time we do this. I agree. Kudos to everyone who took part. If you didn’t make it to the end, no worries. The whole basis of “Three Thing Game” is that you learn what you can achieve in the time, pick up more skills and come round again. Stay tuned for Three Thing Game Spring 2014.
These are the survivors of the finals. Great work folks. Everyone who took part in the competition is awarded a Three Thing Game certificate. Contact me if you want yours.
What a great audience to get things wrong in front of….
I did the XNA Rather Useful Seminar today. Slightly enlivened by the fact that I finished the slide deck only a few minutes before the lecture itself. Oh well. Everything worked eventually…..
You can find the slides here. You can find the demos here.
Sooooo. We had 41 teams and each of them needed Three Things. That’s well over 100 things to auction. In fifty minutes. And we did it.
By the end of the lecture we had a well oiled machine of David, Emily, Martin, Peter and myself who were clearing auction items at the rate of one every fifteen seconds. I’m not sure that everyone got all that they wanted but quite a few got some things. I was very pleased to see teams poring over the things for sale and strategizing before the auction. And the folks outside the lecture waiting to come in were amazed at what was going on.
For the teams, you now have three things. Make a game that involves them. It can be a new type of game, or a more traditional genre themed with the words that you have. Or just forget the things and make a space shooter. Anything goes.
I’m very pleased to be able to report that game developer Boss Alien will be sending some of their folks to take part in the event. They’ll be going round, looking at what is being built and giving helpful comments. They came along in June and enjoyed it so much they are coming back, which is great. They’ll be helping with the judging too.
Next date for your diaries is Wed. 30th November, at 1:15 pm. That’s when I’m doing an XNA overview which will cover how to get a game going and some things moving around the screen. It’s a Rather Useful Seminar and it’s in LTD as usual.
Well, we’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the weekend printing and cutting out “Bank of Thingland” money, stuffing envelopes with notes, printing coloured things and generally getting ready for the Three Thing Game auction tomorrow that starts everything off. The auction is at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 (WI-LT02). Should be fun.
This year, for a change, we are releasing some of the things that will be auctioned, so that you know what is coming up. You can find the list, along with the briefing document, here. If you find that I’ve spelt your name wrong in the team list (it happens) let me know and I’ll update the registration spread sheet.
We got our first ever “in week” Three Thing Game going today. We ended up with 18 teams, which was great, and included one from Boss Alien. I’m kind of in a hurry packing for my trip to New Orleans leaving tomorrow (Simon is taking over tomorrow to do the proper work) but I thought I'd post some pictures.
We had the usual routine of things, programming and Pizza. I made a pass through the lab and took a bunch of pictures. You can find them here. We also had a Summer Bash, lots of fun playing “The Resistance” and “Braggart”.
And now I’m off to bed. Which is more than the teams in the Fenner Computer Suite are doing….
This summer we are doing our first ever “in week” Three Thing Game. We’ve done this to make it fit around examinations for most students. If you fancy some 24 hour game development shenanigans you take part in the 24 hours from 3:00 pm on Thursday 30th of May to 3:00 pm on Friday 31st. That’s how long you’ll have to make your game. The Thing Auction will be at 1:00 pm on Thursday 30th of May in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building. The judging will be at 3:00 pm on Friday 31st of May in the same place. How you spend the time between the two is entirely up to you, but you also get free entry to the Summer Bash on Thursday night, if you are looking for distractions.
Guests from Boss Alien will be along to take part too.
Teams can register by filling in this form and returning it to Rob Miles, with their registration fee, by the end of Tuesday 28th May.
Once the games were finished (or the teams were just too tired to do any more) we had four teams of judges who went around scoring. Each team of judges then picked their top two entries, who went forward into the final rounds. These lucky folks got to present their solutions to the audience.
Lee shows one of the T shirts, in front you can seen the prizes that we have this year. All good stuff including Windows Phones for the winning team, along with some lovely green T shirts.
The survivors….
This is ‘Three Game’O’Holics’, the first presenters, preparing to show off their game inspired by “Fighting, Desk, in a Dress”. This was an impressive take on the bouncy platform style game with a killer two player mode.
This is ‘No Method, No Class’. They formed up as a team last weekand then went on to make a top eight game from “Caffeine, Monkey, under attack”. The gameplay and sound-effects were top notch, as waves of monkeys came in for the kill. The Caffeine High mode was just excellent.
If you want to get ahead, get a hat. Seemed to work for “Did you mean ‘Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?’” who had built a frantic space shooter game from “Fighting Toast Party”. They had random levels, fantastic zooming viewpoints, swarms of enemies and a real “just one one more try” style of gameplay.
Next up was ‘Sheerware Games’ showing off their Hyper Morph Windows Phone game, made from "Flying, Bombs, Tank". This had lashings of retro style, frantic shooting action and swarms of baddies to be despatched.
The Honeybadger crew took Ninja, mountains, defence and crafted an atmospheric game with invaders storming your castle and you letting loose with ninja inspired weaponry to see them off. With sunset powered game progression and lovely artwork this was a smashing phone game.
This is ‘Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway’, perhaps the best team name. Their pun heavy title, “Spray of Duty Modern Warbear” was built on “Poptart, deodorant, teddy bear” and had a lone Teddy soldier using his deodorant to save off increasing numbers of invading poptarts of various flavours. With lovely shader powered plasma effects this looked superb.
Its rare to see all of the Battle Brothers looking happy at the same time, but they certainly were pleased to make top eight. They had created an astonishing looking space warfare game from the starting point of “Pirate, ship, spoon”. This had great 3D graphics and a space opera plot involving spoon based pirate contraband . Of course.
There were around twenty good reasons why the game from ‘The Infamous Two Sirs’ would just not work. This had the most ambitious setup I've ever seen in a Three Thing Game. From the words “Goldfish, Plughole and Invasion” the team crafted a multi-player game experience involving a battle between Kinect controlled angler fish and Windows Phone powered goldfish. Everything worked. Wave your arms to move your angler fish and they dance around the phone screen. Marshal your goldfish on the phone and the player on the Kinect sees tasty goldfish coming into range....
After a lot of deliberation they finalist judges managed to come up with a top three. Here they are in reverse order.
Third place went to Battle Brothers. Well done folks. And to think that the textures were designed by someone who had never done them before this competition. Amazing.
Honeybadger Productions clutching their Kinect sensor prizes. Well deserved and a game with great potential.
Sheerware get the big prize. Richly deserved and hard earned. The sheer (sorry) attention to detail in the game and the way it looked Marketplace Ready was very impressive.
Final prize of the day was the Peoples Choice Award. It was great to see the teams showing off their entries to each other. We got the scores off Survey Monkey and the voice of the people agreed with our judges, awarding Sheerware the prize.
Three Thing Game serves as a reminder as why it is so great to work at Hull with the students. The whole thing was just splendid. Special shout outs to Dave G. for fantastic lab support, Peter, David P, Martin, Simon, Mark, Kevin, Warren and Adam for all playing their parts in making this the best TTG we have ever had. Thanks also to Lee and David from Microsoft and Dean and Dominique from MonoGame for judging and giving the competition industry chops. And thanks to the students for turning up and being so gosh darned awesome. And we now all look forward to the next event…
We did a Rather Useful Seminar today on XNA and creating game assets. Simon did some presentations on asset creation and repositories and I shows off some XNA development stuff. These are the links that Simon mentioned:
Note that the SVN notes are only available via the campus SharePoint site. I did some demonstrations with the amazing “Bread and Cheese” game. You can find the code for this here.
What 20,000 pounds actually looks like. Of course you can't spend it in the shops...
Teams and their Two Things
We had our Thing Auction today. Last year we just managed to get through all the lots in the time that we had. This year we had more teams and just didn't make it. There was a time when I thought that we would get everything done, then a couple of mammoth bidding wars put us a bit behind schedule.
Never mind. We plan to run the "Third Thing Auction" just before the Rather Useful Seminar on Wednesday. That's at 1:15 pm in LTD on the Third Floor of the Robert Blackburn Building. The lecture is all about preparing for Three Thing Game, so it seems rather appropriate.
If any team really can't wait until then to get their hands on a thing, they can contact me and I'll dig one out for them.
It was fun though. The sound the crowed made when the thing "Keyboard cat" came out was wonderful.
Three Thing Game registrations are now closed. We have Forty teams signed up to do battle in code combat. Although turning up, eating pizza and learning some new skilz is also fine by me.
The auction for things is next on the agenda. Amanada has lovingly prepared 40 batches of 500 "Bank of Thingland" pounds for the teams to use to outbid each other for things for their games. That's 20,000 pounds we are giving away today!
We have 120 items to auction in 50 minutes. Should be fun.
robmiles.com
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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