Game Demos

Yesterday was the demonstration session for our open-ended graphics programming coursework.  The students seemed to enjoy themselves - even to the point of turning up in suitably festive clothing:

The aim of the whole exercise was to develop something in Python that involved dynamic graphics. We didn't require it to be a game, but almost everyone chose this option - probably because we devoted several lectures and one of the lab classes to explaining how Pygame could be used for this!

There were some very impressive submissions.  Ian Kernick (pictured above) and Sean Watson - the self-styled 'S & I Productions' - gave us Nazi Zombies: a third-person shooter with suitably gory graphics and sound effects.  So polished was this piece of work that it even had its own movie intro!  One notable feature was the layering of sprites to create a pseudo-3D effect in which the player could move behind or in front of the zombies.

Zombies were also the main enemy faced by the player in Alex Hawes' game, but this time the player was moved around using an XBox 360 game controller.  Ed Worthy used a similar control mechanism in his Geometry Wars clone - all the more impressive for being apparently implemented from scratch in a marathon all-night programming session right before the deadline!  I'd love to see what he could have done with better time management...

There was plenty of other good work on display.  Julie Tillier showed us a very complete and playable PacMan-style maze game and Minos Galanakis demoed a ballistics game in which the player controlled the angle and speed of a projectile fired from a cannon.  Projectile motion was governed by realistic physics and the player's score was synchronised with a high-score table stored externally on an FTP server.

It was common for students to take their inspiration from existing, often very familiar games.  In addition to those examples mentioned above, we saw a decent effort at implementing a Guitar Hero clone (driven by key presses rather than the authentic guitar-shaped controller, regrettably) and also a Frogger-style game called Intoxication, in which the protagonist was a student evading heavy traffic to drink pints of beer that appeared randomly at the roadside!  Hmm...

We rather liked an unusual-looking game from Stefan Piazza and John Lau, called Bit Defence.  It had colourful, distinctive vector-style graphics and was notable for being a two-player game, with multiple levels and power-ups.  The player-controlled sprites had to orbit around a central disc-shaped zone that they were defending, as well as rotating so that they were always facing outwards.  A lot of thought had clearly gone into how this motion could be smoothly and efficiently animated.