Three Thing Game Gets Under Way

We started the Three Thing Game competition today at 7:00pm. It’s going well so far. Around 140 students turned up who are keen to spend some time making games. At the moment everyone is sitting down and working on their game projects. We have a wide range of expertise, including some folks who have been programming for just a few weeks.

We stopped at around 8:30 for pizza and pop. We had 60 pizzas delivered in a mini-convoy and they were demolished by hungry developers in about 25 minutes flat. Many, many thanks to Microsoft who not only sponsored the pizzas today but also provided Lee Stott from the Technical Evangelist team who turned up to take a look and ended up helping me dish out the food.  Lee was at an event a little further up north, but couldn’t resist heading home via Hull to see what was going on. He was telling me all about the new Imagine Cup competitions this year. Most interesting, and a great way to take your Three Thing Game experience onto the next level.

I’ve put loads of pictures on Flickr, you can find them here.

Linux Format Coding Academy 2013

Computing is currently a bit fashionable, which is nice because there are loads of magazines of all flavours out there. And quite often a magazine will lump together a bunch of articles from previous issues and make a kind of “Greatest Hits” compilation. Linux Format has just done that and produced an edition it calls “Coding Academy 2013”.

It seems a bit expensive at 12.99 for what looks like a magazine, but when you consider that there are no advertisements it starts to look better value. There are introductions to Python, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, Scheme and Lisp along with features on Android development. It is all pretty well written, with examples and links to sample code.

If you have C# skills and are looking to find out the meaning behind some of the other words you hear bandied about when people talk computers you could do a lot worse than take a look. If you are complete beginner you might find the range of information a bit wide, but remember that you only have to learn one of these languages at a time.

I found my copy in the local newsagents, you can buy it online here.

XNA for Three Thing Game Rather Useful Seminar

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.

Walrus. Custard. Swimming.

You might not know this (or perhaps even care) but I’m actually a member of a team taking part in Three Thing Game. I’m a part of the Spooky Elephant collective. I’m a sort of “sleeping partner” who doesn’t do much and then turns up to collect the prizes.

Works for me.

Anyhoo, David from our team was at the auction and managed to bag “walrus”, “custard” and “swimming” as the things we are going to have to make a game around. that sounds quite promising to me. But perhaps not as promising as “Team Bacon” who managed to get bread, cooking and,er, bacon. But you have to feel sorry for “The Elite Four” who managed to end up with “Rob Miles”, “Nuts” and “in a dress”. Who knows what they’ll come up with….

Auctioning Things at Enormous Speed

All the teams. All the things.

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 NovemberOctober, 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.

This is going to be so much fun.