Wrestling with Pygame and Cheese

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This pictures is entitled "Unsuccessful Cheese Movement Number 1"

This pictures is entitled "Unsuccessful Cheese Movement Number 1"

The "Wrestling with Python" sessions on Pygame are progressing well. Today we got some cheese moving around the screen under keyboard control. Next week we will add some more sprites and get some proper game action going. You can see on of the first attempts at moving things above. Perhaps we should clear the background after each draw.....

It occurred to us (in a rather nervous-making way) that we are exactly four weeks away from the big event on campus when folks are going to come in and make and show off games. But everyone is learning stuff and having fun, so actually I'm quite looking forward to it. 

If you want to find out what we have been doing you can download the content from here. 

Fun with a Wide Angle Lens

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I've always liked wide angle lenses. I've been playing with one and taking pictures around campus which turns out to be great fun. Places, like the area outside the Student's Union, suddenly look different and strange, and you can get some really interesting angles that you can't get any other way.

If you are interested (and why should you be) the lens I've been playing with is an 8mm focal length FishEye from Samyang. For such a bespoke piece of optics the price is very good, particularly if you get the cheaper silver one. The lens is completely manual, you have to set the focus and aperture by hand, but I rather like that and the cleverness in the camera seems to take this in its stride. The results are pin sharp in the centre of the frame and very good around the edges, particularly if you stop down to F8 or so. The colour rendition is good too, with hardly any fringing.

I'll certainly be taking it on my travels from now on,  it gives a very refreshing angle of view to familiar scenes so it should do amazing things with unfamiliar ones. 

Tricopter Flying over Cottingham

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Yesterday we took number one son's home made tri-copter for another spin. Last time it flew very well, and so we thought we'd add a GoPro camera to see what kind of pictures we could get. We fitted the camera by the simple process of just sticking it on the front plate of the device. This seemed to work OK, although for the first few shots we had the battery wire in the frame.

Turned out that there was more than enough lift to take the camera into the air, although it is a tiny bit more wobbly than we'd have liked. The video came out pretty well, all things considered. 

Saturday Open Day with Added Stupidity

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We had an Open Day at the University today. The place was nicely busy, and of course I took pictures of the folks that turned up. Except that for the first group I forgot to put a memory card in the camera. Which was not optimal. Sorry about that folks. I got you to smile and everything, and then took a picture that turns out not to exist.

Anyhoo, the talks went well (at least I thought so) and some of the Wedding Lights made a guest appearance. I hope you all enjoyed the trip. You can find the C# book (and a fair few other things) here. 

Three Thing Game Summer 2014 Wrap Up

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These are the hardy survivors. Well done folks.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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....

Make Your Documents Work for You

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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

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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. 

Mijnlieff - hard to say, fun to play

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

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

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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

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Octodad.PNG

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.