Three Thing Game Videos Now Live

The judging videos are now all on YouTube. You can find them all (plus the ones from last time) here.

October Three Thing Game Winners

These folks are the true survivors.
Well, we lost a few on the way. The effects of fatigue and the lure of Halloween parties meant that some of our teams didn’t make it to the finish line. However, a good time was had by all and I’ve never seen so much pizza eaten by so many so quickly. The pizza company had to send two cars to deliver all 40. And it all got eaten…

This morning at 7:30 Simon and I went around with a camera and got presentations from all the teams of their games. The videos will be up tomorrow so you can see for yourself how just how good they are. We had some especially impressive solutions from First Year teams who, with only five or so weeks of C# under their belt, produced some highly playable results. Then, at 9:00 sharp the three judges, Warren, Neil and Simon watched the top ten teams and picked the winners. Which was so difficult we had to award two second prizes.

Judges and videos

You’d think they’d look pleased with prizes of this quality….

This is the team that won the award for best interpretation of their Three Things.  “Tactical Nuclear Penguins”, made up of Josh Crowther, Alex Beamer and Dan Burns had to make something from “Funky, Robot, goes underground”. And make something they did. An underground exploring robot agent working down through caverns to fight the devil no less. Hooked up with great dance move beat matching action and coming to Windows Phone Marketplace near you soon.

The first Second Place team, if you see what I mean, “The Double A's”. Anthony Quinn and Aaron Ridge produced a fast moving, pretty much market ready for Windows Phone take on “Extreme Hamster in a Graveyard”. Great work, even if they couldn’t keep their eyes open at the end.

This is the second, Second Placed, team. “I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3” , aka Lindsay Cox, Devon Hansen, David Hart and Michael Bumby. Their game based on “Gun-toting, Volcano, in Space” combined Bejewelled style action with a sideways blast-em-up which had the player matching threes to arm Space Marines attacking the Volcano.  Lots of guns, and lots of toting.  Great work guys. And don’t worry, we’ll have Lego prizes for all of you once we’ve been down to ToysRUs.

The Winners, with their prizes.

The Winners were praised by the judges for producing a game for Windows Phone that was good enough to sell right now, with delightful graphics, a well honed mechanic and good adherence to the theme. And you could slice the moon in half. These guys are making a bit of a habit of winning,  having nabbed the prizes in the last competition too. “The Infamous Two Sirs”, Christophe Lionet and Robert Marshall produced a game based on “Tomb, Ninja, Travelodge” that looks excellent and plays great. Well done guys.

The next Three Thing Game will be on the weekend of 17th and 18th March 2012. Start planning now.

Three Thing Game Gets Cracking

This is most of the students at the start, lets see how many are left at the end.

We got cracking with Three Thing Game this morning. Great things are being done, or at least thought about. Just about everyone has turned up, which means that we have around 100 students in the department for 24 hours or so, trying to finish off a game.

There are loads of pictures on Flickr, some of them even have captions. Find them here.

Lab Assignments Now Available

If you want to find out who you will be working with, you can download the team lab assignments here. Note that they have all been given suitably spooky names….

XNA Session Content

You can find the content from the XNA session (along with lots of other stuff) here:

http://www.robmiles.com/demos

Here are links to the code we developed in the session, plus a bonus “coloured cloud” version.

• Single Moving Cloud
• Lotsa Clouds
• Coloured Clouds

The presentation was firsts given at Mix 11 in Las Vegas earlier this year. You can find a video of the presentation here.

You can get a free XNA book from here.