Students Compete at Video Game Creation

zalas writes "Stanford's computer graphics class holds a video game writing competition each year at the end of the term, and this year's results are finally online. You can download all the finalist entries from the website. The winning entries featured very original game concepts, such as sending a spiked soccer ball through wormhole planets or infesting a growing maze of cheese with mold. Judges at the competition included representatives from Electronic Arts, Microsoft and the creator of Pong, Allan Alcorn. Ironically enough, the winners of the wacky category who received a voucher for an XBOX360 wrote a game that only worked on OSX laptops with the drop-protection motion sensors."

Experimental Gameplay Project

[Psionicist]

I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ [experimentalgameplay.com] - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.

The Experimental Gameplay Project began as a student pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.

As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" Though we successfully met our goal of making over 50 games, we realized that this project had become much less about the games, and much more about the crazy development process - and how we could help others do the same thing. We wrote about this process in our whitepaper How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_ 01.shtml [gamasutra.com] Recommended read.

Stupid Coral cache submission.

[grub]

a) not everyone can access port 8090 from behind a firewall.
b) It's Stanford. Do you really think they're lacking for bandwidth?
non-Coral link here [stanford.edu]

Labyrin3D

[XMilkProject]

The Labyrin3D which won the XBOX is actually a pretty darn cool idea! For those that didn't RTFA it is just like one of those little kids toy's where you must tilt the box around to roll a ball through the maze.

The cool factor comes from the fact that it utilizes the gyros (drop sensors) in the Apple laptop so that you play by tilting the laptop back and forth.

Cool!

Soccer is intresting

[Brain_Recall]

I suck at games, but generally I still like to play them. The Deadly Soccerball is intresting. I had to dig through the readme to determine the gameplay, but essentially you fire off missles to remove the spikes from other spikey balls, then dodge the spikes they drop to go in for the kill. (Note: not explaned, but your health bar is on the right side of the screen.)

Some intresting features in the engine. The "portal" system is totally seamless and you jump from one planet to the next. Even the snakes, which crawl very smoothly and rather realistically, go from one planet to the next. If you take a look around, you can clearly see the snakes crawling along the other planets.

Better yet, I only got one crash from it! :-) (Smashing too many buttons at once, methinks, but not sure.)

Neverball

[HanClinto]

That's really cool about the Labyrinth game -- it would be cool if Neverball [icculus.org] were modified to use a similar input device. It works off of a similar principle, the graphics are fantastic, and it would be sortof an open-source Revolution controller. :)