Where Would You Think

These are the students, with their “things”.

Every semester we do a “Three Thing Game” development. Student teams are given a week to create a game based on three “Things” chosen at random. On Monday we give out the things, as you can see above. We then do some special sessions about game development during the week, and the teams prepare their assets ready for the big development push over the weekend. On Saturday morning the teams set up their work areas in the department and then there is a 24 hour pizza powered development frenzy to get a game working before the judging on Sunday morning.

This time we had the biggest ever competition, with 25 teams turning up. This meant around a fifth of our student population was in the department working on games for 24 hours. Everywhere you looked there were teams frantically preparing assets and honing gameplay. This year we also had a record number of First Year students taking part, some of whom had only started learning C# in September. And they all got something working.

On Sunday we had the judging. Each team starred in a video of their game and the judges had a tricky job, as the standard was really, really high. Some of the creations were pretty much ready for sale. If you want to find out all about the teams, who won and find links to the judging videos you can go to www.threethinggame.com for more.

The next Three Thing Game is on the weekend of the 17th and 18th of March. Some of the students are already preparing…

Hot on the heels of the Undergraduate Party last week we had the Postgraduate one. Same routine, even some of the same quiz questions. These were the lucky (and skilful) winners.

Some of the students having their brains stretched

Today was the day of the UG Welcome Party. We take over a bar in Staff House, set up some video games, eat some free food, hand out some beer tokens and then have some fun. And a quiz. This year was no exception.

This is the winning team. You’d think they’d look happier.

Recently Rob Miles of the department teamed up with Windows Phone developer Andy Wigley to spend two days taking about Windows Phone development, with the focus on the latest version of the platform, codenamed Windows Phone Mango. The sessions were broadcast over the internet to over a thousand live attendees and have just been released as videos. You can find them here. Andy and Rob did a similar set of videos last year which have notched up over 500,000 views.

These are the “slightly processed” prize winners of the hyper multi-mega-wordsearch.

We had our last bash of the year today. It was great fun, even though we had some technical troubles. The camera on the PlayStation Move was definitely faulty, causing me to lose at Table Tennis. Fortunately the Pizza arrived on time, and everybody had fun. Some were there with tears in their eyes, with this being their last bash as students in the department.

There are a few more pictures on Flicker tagged Hull2011SummerBash.