The University of Michigan hosts an annual game development challenge, in which small teams of students have just 48 hours to develop a video game. The event is run by the campus' game development club, Wolverine Soft.
The Team that Wasn't
Friday
7:00 p.m. My team is Chris Williams, Will Burton, and me. Chris is not yet here. We're formulating ideas on the theme, "Honoring Stephen Colbert."
Colbert voiced a character named Phil Ken Sebben in Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. Can we use the character? We're looking into it. We want to use Colbert's voice in the game somehow, but no one knows how to extract or load audio for a game. I'm going to start assembling a makeshift 3D engine while we wait for ideas to pop into our heads.
10:00 p.m. We're all here now, and we have some ideas. We're thinking we're going to have a 3D car, driven by Stephen Colbert, rolling around while he campaigns to become President of the United States. He will be chased by a bear. He will move from house to house on a rectangular map, performing various tasks through different mini-games to win over his "constituents."
Saturday
1:00 a.m. We have a working prototype. It consists purely of a box sliding around a green landscape in 3D perspective. We add a text menu. Chris writes a text file containing quiz questions for use in the game. I write a class to parse the file into a format usable by the game. Chris and Will research methods of reading image and 3D model files while I continue to expand upon the prototype.
Chris and Will have a copy of the prototype to experiment with their ideas while I continue work on the original.
4:00 a.m. I need to sleep. Will works on the 3D parser. Chris attempts to get Subversion running on the network.
5:00 p.m. I return, after eating and sleeping, to find that the others have left to sleep themselves. I've completed the text file parser, but it has bugs that remain unsolved.
I start working on the 3D parser.
6:00 p.m. I'm still working alone. The 3ds Max file parser and text file parser are both functional. The prototype now renders car and house models to the 3D environment. The models' vertices are off-centered, so they don't move as they should when I rotate them. Either the model data files need to be changed to have a repositioned center, or we have to guess where the center is and adjust the center with code. The former is not currently possible, as I don't know how to use 3ds Max.
With the quiz text file parser operational, typed-up quizzes can now be rendered on the screen. Collision detection has yet to be implemented. The centers of the models first have to be corrected in order for coding the collision detection to be practical. Without the center-correction, testing collision detection will either have to wait or be applied in a separate test program instead of in the working prototype.
Sunday
6:00 a.m. I'm still working alone. Collision detection and animation have both been implemented, although locations are not quite accurate. The mini-games, other than the quiz, still need to be implemented. Chris and Will had talked about a button-mashing game. I think I will create puzzle games as well.
5:00 p.m. I've come back from sleeping -- oversleeping -- for eight hours. My teammates are still absent, and I'm told they haven't been seen since they left Saturday morning. I should note that coding the project would have been impossible for them, as all the code lives on my network space. Still, if I had run into them before I had gone to bed, I would have logged them into the machines. Anyway, the project is far from finished. The submission still has to be packaged.
6:00 p.m. No one ever made a project page. None of us knew how. The project is not done. The gameplay, in the state that the project is in, is frustrating and buggy.
I have two main regrets. First, I wish my team had been present for the competition. Second, I should have built my game upon a more established code base, such as an existing engine, rather than constructing an engine ad hoc. Had the game been finished, its planned Wario Ware-like gameplay might have had something to offer. I have learned much in the way of game engine programming, though, and will be using that knowledge on future game projects.
Sean Sheehan is a University of Michigan student and a member of the video game development club. His video game placed fifteenth (last) in the competition.
