Three Thing Game Summer 2014 Wrap Up

These are the hardy survivors. Well done folks.

We had had a great time yesterday writing our games. I left around 10:30 pm having made a good start on my game. Then I was back developing at 7:00, along with lots of the other teams who seemed to have stayed all night and loved it. I lost a few hours doing academic things around the department, but at the end I've got something that I'm kind of proud of (at least from the outside - the code is horrible) and I'm going to get it into a demonstrable form. 

I'm not sure what the market is like for "Old School" text based adventures, but I'm going to find out. By the end 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.

Another 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,

Great game, well worth worthy prizes. 

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. 

There are more team and winner pictures here. 

Update: Forgot to mention. The voting for the People's Choice award is still open. You can vote until Tuesday morning next week (the 17th June). The survey is here. 

Adventure, Crying Baby, Dressing Up

We got our things today for Three Thing Game. Most people got one or two things they wanted. The bidding was fast and frantic, although some words that I thought would sell big didn't really go that well. Anyhoo, I ended up with "Adventure", "Dressing Up" and "Crying Baby". 

I really wanted Adventure. It was the first word to be auctioned and so I rather cleverly spent all my money on it. After that I was forced to take whatever was left, which turned out to be the other two. I've got a plan though.....

Three Thing Game Starts Tomorrow

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 prompt.

This 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.

Folks can bid for any item that comes up, and spend all their money on the very first word if they like. That's mostly what I'm planning to do. I'm in a one man team called "Alien Robot Adventure". We'll see how that goes. 

Wresting with Pygame

We've been running our "Wrestling with Python" course for a while now. An intrepid bunch of local teachers have been coming in on Tuesday evenings to learn a bit about the Python language. Today we started up with our final sequence of the year. We are going to get folks writing games using the Pygame framework.

Then they are going to get their classes writing games and we are going to get a little "local school Three Thing Game action" going on. This is going to end with a hackathon in July with over 100 kids coming into the university and spending a day completing and presenting what they have done. Scary stuff, but we reckon we can make it work.

So today, as a way of getting started, we drew some cheese. As you do. Next week we will have bouncing cheese and possibly a cheese cannon. And why not.

You can find out what we have been doing and download the slide deck and lab sheets here.

Imagine Cup 2014 in Seattle

There's a little Imagine Cup shaped hole in my life this year. For the past few years around this time I'd be fretting about scoring and judges and stuff and getting ready to go and help out with the world finals. The Imagine Cup has given me some of the best experiences of my professional life. From the first ever World Finals in 2003, when "Team Random" and I made it to Barcelona and Third Place, to travelling the world as part of the judging and competition management team, the Imagine Cup has been part of my routine for quite a while. 

I've loved seeing the difference that the competition makes to the lives of the thousands (probably millions by now) of students that have taken part over the years. I always say to folks that they can split their lives into two chunks, the bit before you take part and the bit afterwards, and I've seen the "Imagine Cup Effect" go to work time and time again as folks do things that surprise themselves and everyone around them.

This year we've got some Hull involvement, which is splendid. James Croft is going over to Seattle to take part in the finals as a Microsoft Student Ambassador and Danny Brown is in the UK team helping to make Ripple a worldwide winner. 

Me, I'll be watching the World Finals with interest. It's great to see that Satya Nadella, the new Microsoft CEO, is taking part in the judging. It puts into a very strong context just how much Microsoft value future talent from all over the world.

If you are a student you really should take part. Today it's all about "getting yourself out there" and the Imagine Cup is one of the best "out there" places I know.

Making Screencasts the Hard Way

Having the house to myself this morning I thought I'd record a video of the 08120 Programming 2 Exam walkthrough. I try to remember to make these when I've finished marking the papers. I can cover lots of the questions that folks might have about the right answers and I like to do this when the marking issues are still fresh in my mind. 

Of course it wasn't as simple as I expected. I hadn't done a video for a while, so I had to find the headphones and the microphone, install Camtasia (my favourite program for recording stuff), find that the headphone and microphone weren't working and that sound playback was also broken. Fix all that, set the screen size to work properly, create a PDF that I can browse through and finally, after half an hour of faffing around, get to sitting down and recording something. 

And I thought that modern technology was here to make life easier....

Rainy Saturday

It rained a lot today. Here's a picture of slightly less rainy times. Thursday evening to be specific. 

Make Your Documents Work for You

I've spent a chunk of today performing Seed exit vivas. This is where students on our industrial placement module have to come along and explain why they should get 5 out of 5 for Project Management. Or whatnot. We discuss things for 45 minutes or so and finally agree on figures for each marking category. Sometimes the figure goes down, but in a surprising number of cases we end up delivering the happy news that we think that they have undervalued their work. Which is nice.

One thing I like to do is point at pages that have been supplied as part of the thick folder of documents and ask "What's that for?". This can be quite illuminating. For example:

"What's that for?"
"It's the Risk Analysis."
"OK, where did it come from?"
"Well, at the start of the project we wrote down all the risks we could think of, and that's the result."
"Did you ever look at it again?"
"No. Should we?"

.. at which point the conversation goes downhill a little bit. Risks should be identified and then tracked over the project. At regular intervals the document should have been produced and checked over to make sure that nothing has changed, and that none of the risks were becoming critical. 

If you are going to take the trouble to make a document that is part of your development then you are making an investment in your time. It is important that the investment pays off. Documents should "earn their keep".

The Risk Analysis document should be checked and updated at regular intervals to make sure that risks are managed. Minutes of meetings should record who was there, what was said, give people actions and check on actions from earlier meetings. Specifications should be signed off. Tests documents should be acted on and then the results of the tests recorded and used to drive future development. I could go on (and in fact I did - quite a bit). 

I got the feeling that some of the documents were shoved in "because we thought we had to write them". I also got the feeling that some folk thought that writing all this was a distraction from the proper job, which was creating the solution for the customer. However, this is very, very, important stuff. It can make the difference between success and failure in a project. And doing it right will definitely get you higher grades....

C4DI Arduino Hardware Meetup

We had our fourth in the series of Ardunino hardware meetups tonight. Peter was in charge, and he had folks attaching infra-red receivers to the Arduino boards and creating remote controlled lights. This involved making cunning use of TV remote controls specially purchased from Poundland (you'll never guess how much each one cost).

You can download the exercise from here if you fancy having a go.

Great fun for all, and a few new folks turned up, which was very nice. Hope to see you all at the next one. 

Don't forget that Three Thing Game Wants You

There's still time to register for TTG (and Summer Bash) 2014. Head over here for details and a registration form.

Mijnlieff - hard to say, fun to play

Turns out that this is not a winning position if you are playing with the light tiles....

Last week in Whitby I bought a little two player game (there are some good game shops in Whitby - and a good sweet shop or two..). Anyway, this weekend we got around to playing it. 

The game is called MijnLeiff, a word my spelling checker doesn't know. Players take it in turns to put tiles down on a board with the aim of making rows of three or more of their own colour. What makes it more interesting is that the piece that you put down dictates where on the board your opponent can make their next move. And with a limited number of different pieces for each player it gets very, very, tactical towards the endgame. 

If you like games which are easy to pick up, quick to play and somewhat strategic, you will like this one.

Tricopter Flying

What happens when you strap three motors, a battery and some bits of electronics to some lumps of wood? You get something that flies, that's what. After overcoming our initial nerves from a while back we managed to get some quality flying time in on Sunday morning. The amazing thing is that it all worked.

Number one son now has a fully working tri-copter. It seems to be happy to hover on around a third power, which means that it should be up for camera lifting duties quite soon.  

Octodad - eight legs of fun

Last night we spent some time playing Octodad- dadliest catch. This is a deeply silly game where you take the role of a man sized octopus taking the role of an ordinary suburban husband. Although your lack of co-ordination and deep seated fear of aquariums is starting to raise suspicions....

We played it on the PlayStation 4, and it at least gave us a reason to get out all that PlayStation Move hardware, which was a surprisingly good fit with the unwieldy tentacles of our hero. Towards the end things got surprisingly poignant, and I never did find out just what happens in the aquarium cafe, when we meet our nemesis, the mad chef who is one of the very few who know the fishy secret.

If you are looking for something fun to play, with a compelling story line, then it is worth seeking out. 

Bee Pictures

The Buddleia had a whole bunch of bees on it, so I set my little camera in macro mode and fiddled around until I got the picture above, which I'm quite pleased with. Then I got out my Lovely Lumia 1520 and got this by pointing it at the flower and pressing the shutter button:

I'm finding fewer and fewer situations where I need to have a proper camera with me....

Driven to Distraction. And Bristol.

Spent a big chunk of today driving down to Bristol. If you ask me, the day of the self drive car can't come soon enough....

Unbearably Whitty

At least you get a nice picture to look at...

I tweeted this joke last weekend from Whitby, but nobody seemed to notice or care. So I thought I'd blog it, just in case anybody missed it....

What do you call a caveman who can't walk in a straight line?

A meanderthal

Using a Progress Ring in Windows Phone 8.1

I'm slowly getting the hang of unified applications. Most of the time I'm having to forget how the phone does things, and pick up some Windows 8 habits. The busy indicator is a case in point. Using it is very easy, but it is different from the phone and so I thought I'd blog it here in case I forget. You can get a rather nice animated ring display like the one above by simply adding it to the XAML in your page:

<ProgressRing Name="BusyProgressRing" IsActive="False"></ProgressRing>

Then, in your program, you can just turn it on and off when you start something that might take a while to complete.

BusyProgressRing.IsActive = true;

I've written a stupidly simple unified app that lets you start and stop the ring displaying at the touch of a button. You can find it here. 

This form of display is used when your program is doing something that will take a while to complete, and you don't know how long it will be. I use it when I'm setting up Bluetooth connections. 

Improving 3D Printer Quality by Adjusting the Temperature

For a while now I've been trying to improve the quality of prints from Una the Ultimaker. I've replaced quite a few bits and bobs here and there and she is now pretty reliable. But I've been having problems with "lumpy layers". Objects with flat sides end up having lots of ridges in them, as if the printer was laying down layers of different thicknesses.

You can see the effect above. The layers at the bottom of the print are nice and smooth, and then they suddenly become thicker and more uneven. This is not a huge problem but, me being me, I've been trying to figure out what causes it, particularly as earlier prints didn't seem to have the same problem. 

Turns out that it is all down to temperature. I used a plugin which is part of the Cura slicer which converts designs into printer instructions. The plugin lets you tweak printer settings at different heights during printing. The layers at the bottom of the print were printed at 210 degrees centigrade, then it switched to 215 and so on upwards in steps of 5 degrees. The effect of the changes is much more significant than I thought it would be. I've noticed that different makes and colours of printing material have quite different temperature profiles. I think I'll have to do a test print like this for each one and then set decide on an optimal temperature.

Oh, and I also managed to include a human hair in the picture so that you can get some idea of scale. It really is astonishing how precisely this technology can be made to work. 

Update: One thought occurred to me after writing this post. The temperatures I'm quoting are as reported by Una, and are probably unique to her (it) as different machines will have different arrangements of print head and temperature sensor. If the temperatures that I mention don't work for you the try different ones, the important point here is that it is worth calibrating your machine for each different material. 

Home to a Bluetooth Printer

We spent the night in Whitby at the Dolphin Hotel. We had a lovely large room which overlooks the bridge right in the centre of the town. I took the photo from the room first thing in the morning, just before we headed down for a really nice (and huge) breakfast. If you are looking for somewhere to stay, I strongly recommend the place.

Then we headed home and I found some time to finish off the hardware for the Bluetooth printer I've been working on.  Note how it is a Bluetooth device, and I've put it in a bright yellow enclosure. And why not....

When I designed the box it seemed like a good idea to put the switch in the bottom. Of course it is actually a bit silly, as whenever you put the box down you turn it on or off. Fortunately I have some bit stick-on feet that help with this, but I'm going to have to refine the design anyway as I don't seem to have left much room to allow the actual construction of the device.....

This is the guts of the printer, just a bunch of batteries and a trusty Bluetooth adapter. I'll post full details of construction and the software later this week. 

Whitby at Whitsun

We've gone to Whitby for Whit weekend. It seemed somehow appropriate (I must have used that line before). Anyhoo, I took the camera.

I took this one of the beach, and then tweaked it a bit.