Introduction

During Wolverhampton University’s Post Graduate Programming for Games and Animation module, students were expected to work individually to understand and apply the game development process, supported by a series of game design lectures and self directed research. One of the aims of the module was to produce a computer game concept document, design document, a game of our choosing, and a postmortem evaluation – all in just 12 weeks. The development would be programmed in C++ using Visual Studio 2005 extending a University developed game framework called “Egg”. Prior programming experience was a pre-requisite to the module. The purpose of the module as described in the module guide was to:

• Introduce students to the games development process

• Introduce students to the .NET framework for developing games

• Introduce students to programming through practical examples

My aim from the outset was to produce a complete and coherent working game with increasingly challenging levels; there are 23 levels in the final game. The actual selection of the game was a tricky one which used up valuable time early on. Many late night experiments were conducted to evaluate several ideas including an Asteroids clone, a side-scrolling platform game in the Mario style, and a number based puzzle game. I finally settled upon the idea of an educational flash-card puzzle game with a maze theme, a fusion of Pac-Man, Frogger, Countdown and Hang-Man.

This game was named Flash Rabbit. In this game our hero “Flash Rabbit” has to solve the word puzzle posed on the flash card at the start of play. Flash Rabbit achieves this by running around his field collecting letter balloons to make up a word matching the picture shown on the flash card. However, the clock is ticking and there isn’t much time and obstacles often get in the way. Carrots and lettuces can be fed to Flash Rabbit for clues and more time but time is always short and snails and bees abound which can lose Flash Rabbit even more time.