Three Thing Game Finals

These are the hardy survivors

By the end of the competition we had around 20 teams that wanted judging. This is about par for the course for the November Three Thing Game, as people discover to their cost what happens if they ignore my "Keep it Simple" advice and end up with not a lot at the end (although I would strongly advise teams to always submit something for judging - you may not win, but you'll get a lot of good feedback and very likely some respect to).

By the end of the judging pass we had the top finalists, and they got to present their games. Here they are in no particular order:

First up was first year team TBC with an astonishingly rich text based adventure game written "because we don't know enough XNA just yet". They'd managed to fashion a compelling narrative from the things "shoe, horn and cream". Very nice work.

Next we had the "Ice Team Cones" who had created "Bereavement Bonanza", a fast paced shoot-em-up where you have to fight for your inheritance, from the things "Inheritance, property and goods". Some nice gameplay twists around what happens when you die (other players get your goods) and "retro-cheese" graphics in this one. 

This is team "Penetration Innovation" with their zombie game created from "dread, dead, grave". It's a bit hard to see the zombie hordes chasing the player around a scary village, but they all use some very clever algorithms to get an effective chasing action. 

Team Baeshaw are a bunch of Three Thing Game old hands, and they brought some lovely polish to the competition with a musical line following game inspired by "Equation, crescent and curve". Players control the waveform type (sine or square) and the amplitude with the aim of following the target line and hitting all the notes. Get it right and the music goes up a gear. Miss a few and the tune reflects your lack of skills. Very nice work, one that should go for sale I reckon. 

This is team "Just One Guy" got the words "hot, cold and bear". He was showing off  a lovely puzzle platformer built with a bear that could heat to steam to fly, wander round as cold and then turn to ice to freeze over the watery barriers. The artwork fitted the theme perfectly and the gameplay was beautifully thought out and with great progression as the various "states of the bear" are used to solve puzzles. 

If there was a prize for the sharpest dressed team in the competition it would have to go to the "Black Godzillas" who still managed to look freshly pressed after a night of development. There game, inspired by the things "Why, are and you" had a fighting knight forced to re-examine his choice for a peace-full life when his quiet village is razed to the ground by invaders. The animation was jaw droppingly good and the storyline intriguing. 

I didn't envy the judges their task when they went out to pick the winners, but they managed somehow to come up with four teams who were announced, as is the fashion, in reverse order.

Team TBC came away with fourth place, the judges praising their story telling and how much content they'd managed to create and fit together in the time they had.

Team Baeshaw were third, being singled out for the polish of their creation and its "just one more go" appeal.

Team "Penetration Innovation" were second. The judges were hugely impressed with their algorithms to give the Zombies a life-like (or should that be death like) behaviour as they hunt down their prey.

Which left "Just One Guy" to pick up the First Place. Judges were full of praise for the way that the artwork and the gameplay complemented the things and the overall thought and design that went into the finished product. A stunning piece of work from just one developer. 

After the main prizes had been given out the judges wanted to specially commend a few teams. Here's Lee (on the left) giving awards to "Twitch Plays TTG", the one man next to Lee and "Spooky Elephant", Warren and David on the right, for their technical innovation in gameplay.

Final award of the night went to team Alex² + 2AlexDan + Dan² who produced something really special with an adherence to theme that was above and beyond the call of Three Thing Game. You have to see the video to find out more. 

Thanks go to Lee and Lilian from Microsoft for their support, to Derek for judging, for the team from BetaJester who not only helped with judging, but also served the pizza, Louis for judging assistance and the 3D viewers given to each team  and Lindsay from Platform Expo for helping to judge and also producing some much appreciated alcoholic prizes for the winning teams.

Three Thing Game will be back in March next year, but keep your eyes open for Global GameJam Hull, coming at the end of January.

I'll post links to the videos later. 

Three Thing Game Overnighter - It Begins

We started the overnight portion of Three Thing Game November 2015 today. We handed out the things and got folks going early in the evening. Lilian from Microsoft came along and told us all about the neat cloudy things available for students from Azure (find out more here) and I did my "Keep it Simple" routine where I advised teams to start with something simple that works and then build on that. We'll see how many follow my advice....

After the briefing, and once the labs had finished, it was time to head for the various computer rooms around the campus and for everyone to get set up. I was very concerned that we wouldn't fit in the department but as it turned out everyone spread themselves around the department rather handily, with four different labs playing host to teams of developers.

I settled down in the Fenner Computer lab and tried to get a few things done, in between ordering pizza and sorting things out. The pizza was a little bit later than I planned, but we did have a lot of pizzas. Three car's worth.

By the time we had fed everybody there were a few pizzas left, but Warren reckoned that by the morning they'd all be gone.

Once food had been had everyone settled down for the night. I'm now much to old to work overnight so around 10:45 or so I gave Lilian a lift back to her hotel (and had some wonderful shenanigans outside Hull Paragon Station where I tried to drive the wrong way a Taxi rank (they didn't like that).  I think I had the look of Uber about me. 

Anyhoo, things look set for some interesting games tomorrow. I took a bunch of pictures of the teams as they got started. You can find them here. 

Give Things Away

One of the smartest things I ever did was to give away the C# Yellow Book. I've had more interest and traffic from the free downloads than I'd ever have got if I tried to make a profit from the text. 

I was talking to one of the musician folks who will be helping make music and sound effects for Three Thing Game on Friday and I was expounding on this theory. My theory is that people really love free stuff, and that if you make a name for yourself as a provider of good, free, stuff then sooner or later someone will want to hire you for a proper job.

The great thing about being young and creative is that you often have more ideas than you know what to do with. So why not put some of the stuff you make out there for free and see what comes back. If you're a programmer you can get a similar effect by taking part in Open Source Projects.  

Rob at Future Decoded

That's me on the Red Stage. I wonder how it got it's name? Thanks to Edward for the picture. You've not given me permission actually, but you put the shot on the internets and so I reckon it's fair game. And anyway, I think I may have taught you to program a while back and I so I reckon we are probably quits. 

Anyhoo, today saw me up bright and early and heading off to London for Future Decoded. I was giving a "Grok Session", in fact one of the very last ones of the day. I was a bit worried that nobody would come - after all 

That's me at the bottom...

One thing that amazed me was the number of people who came up to me and told me that I taught them to program many years ago. Fantastic to see them doing well. And quite a few came to my talk, which was lovely.

I was talking about Snaps, my little framework that is designed to help people learn how to program, but turns out to be a neat place to create simple applications. The audience was great, much fun was had and I managed to get to Kings Cross to catch my train back in good time. Thanks to Lee for inviting me.  I took some pictures, as you do...

Robot Bartenders..

Big Banners

I think their "goodies were well tuned to the audience demographic"

Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi - Snaps secrets of the LogoBlaster

Spent a lot of today working on the presentation for Future Decoded tomorrow. I'm showing off my Snaps framework for creating simple applications. It's almost ready for release. If I hadn't just decided to renumber all the chapters of the book that it is linked too, thereby breaking all the sample code, it would be available now.....

Anyhoo, I dropped Snaps onto a Raspberry Pi (which is really easy to do) and built a bunch of embedded snaps.  I'm going to show how easy it is to use Snaps with embedded code and show of my LogoBlaster device.

This is the code that reads from a pin and changes to the next logo if the pin has been pressed. All that displayNextImage does is fetch the next picture. No need to set up an GPIO, just use the snaps engine methods. I'm really looking forward to the talk tomorrow.

Biggest Ever Three Thing Game - with added thing trading

If you download the big images from Flickr you can just about read the things at the back...

We launched our biggest ever Three Thing Game today. We have over 200 students and 50 teams taking part. I'm a bit worried about fitting everyone into the department on Friday night.

I had this theory that quite a few folks wouldn't turn up. But in the end we had all but three teams come along to get their things. This year I've used the Edinburgh Associative Database to produce sets of three related things. I've written a little C# program that reads the network of words and produces enough sets of things for the competition.  I'll put it on GitHub when I get round to it. 

Thing Trading

This year, for the first time, we are also allowing teams to trade their things with each other. This resulted in a flurry of activity and some very strange sounding conversations. 

The development starts now, with the overnight session on Friday and judging on Saturday. Great fun. 

Visual Studio Code and Alien Invasions

One thing that got pretty heavy mention at the MVP summit was Visual Studio Code. Turns out this is awesome. I reckon that if aliens ever come to earth it won't be to steal our water or turn us all into their slaves or whatever. It will be to get hold of Visual Studio. It is the best place in the universe to write code. 

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight development environment that takes the essence of the Visual Studio development process and makes it work on Lunix, Mac OSX and Windows. It is designed to be extensible, so that you can create bindings for your own development process and programming language (although there are lots available already). And it's free.  Great stuff.

Perhaps by beaming the installer out into space we can save ourselves an alien invasion or two. 

Printer Bashing

This had better keep working...

You should never try and do anything when you have jetlag. Especially print things. Today was the day I needed to print up all the materials for the Three Thing competition. Like I did for the last few years I fired up my printer and, like it did for the last few years, it promptly proceeded to jam up with paper.

Some things about the modern world confuse me. We can put men on the moon (although that was a long time ago). We can fathom out the deepest mysteries of science. We can create vast and powerful networks that span the globe. But we can't make a device that reliably feeds paper into itself.

Up until now I've just fixed all the paper jams and carried on, repeatedly printing until I get all the copies I need. But today I had jetlag, which reduced my tolerance of such foibles to avery bare minimum. So that, and the realisation that I'd have to do exactly the same thing next year, and the year after that, made me pick the printer up, throw it in the car and take it to the tip.

Then I went on to Staples and picked up a replacement printer. I think I may have annoyed the staff by the way that I went along the row, typing product numbers into Amazon and looking for a device with a set of good reviews. Turns out that there aren't that many in that situation. Which confuses me. (see above)

Anyhoo, the HP Envy device that I selected was well reviewed and comparatively cheap. It will cost a huge amount to keep going - of course - but I'm hoping that it will print reliably for a year or two.

Advanced Jetlag Wrangling

I'm trying a new technique for dealing with jetlag on the return flight this time. It involves getting up at 2:00 am on the day you fly back (which is around 10:00 am in the target time zone). That way I figure that I will sleep on the plane and then wake up perfectly adjusted.

What could go wrong?

MVP Summit Last Day

This is what passes for MVPs on the rampage....

Today was the last day of the Microsoft MVP Summit. Tomorrow I fly home. I've just about got over the jet lag, in time for another bout when I get home. We had another day of interesting discussion and a hackathon which was great fun. Then out for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and then packing.

It's been a great summit. I always leave these occasions with a head full of ideas for things to do and a strong desire to come back for the next one. Thanks to Microsoft for setting up such a fantastic event.

HoloLens Experience at the MVP Summit

They wouldn't let me take a picture of the HoloLens device...

It wasn't quite a "Golden Ticket" in the Willy Wonka style, but it did open up a rather interesting new world. On Sunday night, at the party, I was given a ticket to a session at the rather grandly named "Holographic Academy" on the Microsoft Campus. Today was the day that I got to try the new augmented reality.

From what I can tell, the academy is a large room with a bunch of powerful PCs, some tables and couches, and of course some HoloLens devices. I initially thought that the PCs were there to perform the rendering for the headsets. I was wrong. The headsets are completely self-contained. They are also very well made and looked "production quality" to me. They even fitted over my rather large glasses.

The 3D augmentation effect that they produce is totally believable. I placed a virtual "cat" on a table, walked the length of the room and then went back to it. The cat was still in exactly the same place. I looked up and down, let and right and the virtual objects in the scene all moved exactly as they should have done with no discernable lag or flicker. The sound experience is worth mentioning too. I could place objects in 3D space with my eyes closed, just by listening. And if I turned my head the objects moved as well.

The only real issue is that the region of filled with the virtual objects is only about a third of your field of view. This is a limitation of the display technology they are using. Perhaps over time the field of view will improve, but even now it is good enough to give a very impressive experience.

After a few minutes I took my headset off and was intrigued by the spectacle of a whole bunch of people wearing the headsets and moving round the room looking at things which just were not there.  You could tell where they were looking, you just couldn't see what they were looking at.

A future with these devices in it is going to be a very interesting one indeed.

Using the US Surface Pro 4 Keyboard in the UK

I really like my Surface Pro 4 keyboard. Especially the fingerprint sensor bit, which makes unlocking my device very easy. Unfortunately the fingerprint sensor enabled version of the keyboard is not available in the UK. Fortunately I'm presently in the 'states and I've been able to get hold of one from the Microsoft Store here.

The bad news is that it is, of course, a keyboard with the US layout. The good news is that it is extremely easy to change keyboard layouts in Windows 10. The first thing you need to do is make sure that your machine has both languages installed. Go to Settings> Time and Language

If you're missing the USA language option just press the + and add English(United States). Then, whenever you call up the keyboard you can select the language to use by calling up the on-screen keyboard and  pressing the key in the bottom right. Then, pick your language. The change takes effect immediately and it means that I can swap between my docked keyboard (UK) and my Pro 4 keyboard (US).

The only snag is that of course some of the keys are in different places, but I'm getting better at adapting....

MVP Summit 2015 Day 1

These are the trees across from the hotel

Today was the first day of the MVP Summit proper. After getting up bright and early (it was kind of hard not to bearing in mind the time difference I'm working with) we headed off to the Microsoft Campus. The sessions at the summit are organised into tracks and this year I've decided to follow the "Internet of Things" track. I want to find out what the future holds in the embedded computing space from the Microsoft perspective.

The answer is; a lot. I've always liked making embedded gadgets, although I've been painfully aware of their limitations in the greater scheme of things. It's fine to make a balancing robot, or flashing lights or a Logo Blaster, but for me the true usefulness of embedded devices only comes when they are properly connected to each other and the internets. And by properly connected I mean behind industrial strength networking, loophole free operating systems and trustworthy authentication.

I don't think I'm giving much away when if I say that Microsoft seems to feel the same way too. For me the great stuff was not just the future of Windows 10 on embedded devices (although that is looking really interesting) but also the cloud elements that are going into place behind these tiny, cheap processing machines. Inspiring stuff.

When we arrived at the hotel and got off the bus after a day of fascinating content Doug turned to me and said "Careful that you don't sit down on the bed in your room, fall asleep and wake up at 10:00 pm". I assured him that I wouldn't do anything as silly as that, and that I'd see him at the MVP Summit Welcome Reception in an hour or so. Then I went upstairs to my room, sat down on the bed and........

Oh well.

I'm a bit cross with myself to be honest. Missed a party with free food and drink. Ho hum. At least I'll be nice nd fresh for tomorrow morning. At 3:00 am....

MVP Summit Party at the Living Computer Museum

Driving over the floating bridge to Seattle

One of the highlights of the MVP Summit is the party organised by Desiree and her team. I've been lucky enough to go on a few of these over the years, and there was much excitement tonight as we boarded the bus to "Who knows where" for the event this year.

The coach driver was sworn to secrecy but after a short journey from Bellevue to the Seattle outskirts we arrived at the party venue  The Living Computer Museum.  

Commodore Pet running my bubbles program

The key word in the name of the museum is "living". These machines are all in working order and you are allowed, even encouraged to play with them. I was able to relive some of the coding of my younger days and I went round putting my "bubbles" program on as many machines as I could find (and there were a lot of them):

10 PRINT SPC(RND(1)*40);"o":GOTO 10

This displays a rather nice rising bubble display. See if you can work out how it works.

I learnt to program on one of these

Once I'd had a play with all the microcomputers (and there were a lot of them) I spotted something that really made my heart jump. They had a card punch machine just like the one that I used when I was learning how to program. At the university we had a bunch of these and you would type your program onto punched cards that were fed into the machine two or three times a day, They even let me sit down and punch a card for old time's sake.

It's a very weird feeling to see something that you used to use (and which was at the cutting edge in it's day) turning up in a museum like this. When you think that the iPads and flat screen TVs that we think are state of the art now will be in a similar situation in forty years or so it gives you pause to think about technology and how fast it changes things.

A truly awesome place.  Not for all perhaps, but for Microsoft MVPs I can't really think of a better place to have a do. I'd be happy to have the party there every year. I'm certainly going back there under my own steam at some point in the future.

Seattle Trip

So, the plan for this morning was to catch the bus to Seattle, get on the monorail, go the Space Needle, go to the top and have a coffee. Or, in pictures:

Get a bus from the Bellevue transit centre

Grab the Monorail to the Space Needle

Go to the top and take some pictures

Grab a coffee

Hello Bellvue

So, here I am in one of my favourite places in all the world. For one of my favourite events of the year. I've been coming to the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit for a while now, and it is always fun. it is great to see a bunch of familiar faces and get to talk tech.

I flew in this afternoon on a geek-packed plane. The best way to get from Hull to anywhere is to nip down to Humberside airport, take a one hour flight to Schipol airport near Amsterdam and then fly anywhere; usually non-stop. So that's what I did.

The flight was great, although the last twenty five minutes were a bit more action packed than I was expecting. On some flights the captain says "Watch out for turbulence" and nothing much seems to happen. Well, this time we definitely got the bumpy ride that was promised.

After a bit of queuing at the airport we headed for the bus. A 2.50 dollar bus ride beats a 50 dollar cab ride every day. Once I'd unpacked I of course headed for the Bellevue mall and the Microsoft Store there. I wanted to have a look at the new Surface Book and see what other goodies they had in stock. The store was mad busy. Packed with people stacked up and waiting to buy stuff. It was so hectic at one point I had to go upstairs to the Apple store for some peace and quiet....

The Surface Book looks really nice and I was mentally setting aside the funds to get one but I've now really changed my mind. Thing is, it is rather expensive and probably scratches an itch that I haven't got. I don't need hairy graphics performance or all day battery life and so I reckon I can make do with my trusty Surface Pro 3. The other thing that I discovered is that the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover is awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. The keys are much better, the trackpad is proper and the hinge arrangement seems a lot stiffer, so it is much less "clacky" if you fold it back to angle the keyboard a bit. This keyboard is so good that I think it makes the Surface Pro a really viable laptop, without the need for the fancy book.

I'm typing this post on the new keyboard and it works really well. I managed to get one of ones with built in fingerprint reader (not available in the UK sadly) and It works wonderfully too. I'm going to have to live with slightly wrong keys here and there, but I reckon it is worth the trade off.

They also had some Microsoft Band 2 devices on sale. I quite liked my version 1 band, but it was never really as comfortable as I would have preferred. The new band addresses that, with much more flexible sides and a really premium feel that is streets ahead of the first version. I picked up one of them too (I figure that if I decided to get one any later they would have sold out) and I'll have a play with it later in the week. All I want to do at the moment is sleep....

Go see "The Martian"

The new Bond movie opened on Monday. So we went to see "The Martian" instead.

It. Is. Brilliant. Proper science, well told story, amazing special effects and even Sean Bean. What's not to love?

I read the book a while back and really enjoyed it, although I did wonder how they would manage to change something that was mostly internal dialogue into a proper film. The answer is: very well. The film has a very well told earthbound story that adds a lot to the whole affair.

It's a great film, go see.

When we got back from the film we fancied something to eat. I was going to have some cooked chicken and number one wife fancied a boiled egg. But we couldn't decided who should eat first.

Northen Stars at C4DI

A good sized audience

It would seem that the C4DI is taking up quite a large chunk of my life at the moment. Last week we had the awards ceremony, yesterday Jon Moss came and gave a Rather Useful Seminar and today I'm down at the Northern Stars. The idea behind the event was simple. Make a three minute pitch of your startup idea to an audience. Best one on the night wins an iPad. Twenty of the best pitches from events around the area win a slot in the grand final and a chance to go for top ten startups of the year. A great way to get your name out there and learn how to work an audience in 3 minutes.

Jon Polling pitches I'm In

Unfortunately I was in a student lab session when the event started (embedded development - great fun) so I didn't get to see all the presentations. I was sorry to miss the pitch from Arc Studios, especially when they told me that they had based the content on my Lectures in Rhyme. After pizza, and a really interesting discussion about technology and the area, the winner was announced as MrLista, the ultimate Wish List generator.

Now that's a good sign....

On the way out I spent some time trying to get a good picture of The Deep, which was looking very splendid in a high tide.

Carefully stitched....

There were a few of our First Year students amongst the crowd. I told them that I expected them to be pitching their ideas this time next year...

Jon Moss from C4DI at a Rather Useful Seminar

Jon Moss from C4DI came along today to give a Rather Useful Seminar. We had another great audience and I was really pleased to see so many First Year students turning up. I'd asked Jon to come and give some tips for success, and to talk about the new C4DI and what it means to our undergraduates.

Jon gave a fantastic talk, drawing on his experience of life to set out a really good agenda for success. I'm not going to steal the content of his entire talk (although it is tempting) but I did make notes of the ten important points that he made.  I hope you can read my handwriting.

The C4DI is entering a really exciting phase, with a new building and lots of local interest in startups and technology. It's going to provide a really great trajectory for students who want to stay in lovely Hull and build something great. The reason I can say that with confidence is that it has already done this.

Thanks again Jon for an excellent talk.

The University Bookshop Rocks

Bottom row on the left, if you are interested....

We are very lucky to have a bookshop right on the university campus. It's been through a number of names while I've been here. It started as Haigh and Hochland, then changed to Bowes and now it is Waterstones. I've not been in for a while, and I must admit to my eternal shame that I only dropped in last week out of vanity. Someone had mentioned that they still had a copy of my XNA book on sale, and it turned out to be true, which I found amazing. Now we just have to get someone to buy that copy and see if they restock....

Anyhoo, the bookshop is great. Like most bookshops it has branched out a ways, and along with course books there are is now a goodly selection of games and other bits and bobs. They've even got a copy of the awesome Cash and Guns board game. And a big shelf full of graphic novels that I don't remember seeing last time I was there.  And lots of other stuff that would make good presents if I ever find myself in the position of needing something to give away in a hurry.

If, like me, you've not been in for a while, go take a look. If you are new to the campus it's a very useful resource. Bookshops are taking a hammering thanks to scarily useful services like Amazon, but we really should support their business. Starting by buying my book.....