Windows 10 + Three Thing Game Ends

Hardy Survivors

We reached the end stops today. By the finish we had 12 teams taking their games through to the finals. Two teams of judges went round and judged six entries each. Then we took each judges top three and brought them together to make the top six finalists. And then we settled down in Lecture Theatre D to look at the game videos the teams had prepared.

Team Spooky Elephant

First up was team "Spooky Elephant" who's take on "Abel Pots Sink" had Cain pushing a water filled sink  to catch crockery hurled by a vengeful Abel. Motion captured graphics and sloshing water effects made for madcap gameplay accompanied by a Benny Hill soundtrack. 

Team 1

Next up was "Team 1" who had a taken "Jury Hang Hung" and made a life management game for a hapless individual that needed to be kept out of trouble. This game ran on Windows desktop, Phone and Raspberry Pi, a splendid technical achievement.

Team Don't know

This is team "Don't Know", who took "Coil Loop Wire" and made a platformer where the aim is to protect the coil at all costs. 

Team GDB

Here we have the entry from Team GDB who took "Food Much Many" and built a multiplayer fighting game where the aim is to destroy the edible scenery and drop your opponent into a vat of deadly custard. 

Betajester and Squid Physics

This is a joint effort from Betajester and Squid Phyics, who took "Envy Cars Toys" and built a sandboxed car fighting game in the micro-machines mould. Aiming envious blows at better vehicles than the one you start with allows to to change places with the good cars and progress to bigger and bigger battles. 

"Blue Team of Death"

BlueTeam of Death took the words "Eyed Wide View" and made a maze based first person shooter with a great eight bit ambience. Destroy the eyes and progress through the rooms to win. Too much damage causes your view of the playfield to widen and distort, making it harder to aim. 

The judges went away for deliberation and we passed the time exchanging Pirate jokes and discussing whether we should have a Three Thing Game trophy (general consensus - great idea). Then the judges came back and announced the winners. 

Third Place - Spooky Elephant

Team Spooky Elephant were commended for making a highly playable and amusing game, and got third place. 

Second Pace - GDB

Second place went to team GDB who's multiplayer action and adherence to the theme made for some great gameplay. 

First Place - Blue Team of Death

You know the judges have done a great job when the announce the winner and the room cheers and applauds. "Blue Team of Death" really wowed the audience with a fantastic game which was built from scratch, assets and all and then coded up using Unity, a platform that neither of them had used much. Two strong messages from the judges: great game, and you should get this in the marketplace as soon as possible. 

Judge's special mention - Johnson sings the blues

Before the judges wrapped up, they wanted to mention the team "Johnson sings the blues" who made it into the top six, but were prevented from appearing in the final because they had not got around to making a video. Their game, based on "Rave Cant Rave" was a chunk of multi-player mayhem with a screen that seemed to use up all the colours there are. At once. The team got a special award and was sent away with the strong message "Next time, make a video". 

You can see the winning game video here. I'll put up links to the other entries as I get them. 

Thanks to Warren, Lee, Simon, Nick and Josh for judging. Thanks to Lee, Simon, Dean and Nick for coming along and helping make the event the massive success it was. 

Three Thing Game will be back in November. With a revised Thingomatic and a trophy. Oh yes. 

Windows 10 + Three Thing Game GameJam Starts

The GameJam started promptly today at 10:00 am. By 10:30 most of the teams had turned up and signed in. All things considered, what with it being the last two days of the semester, we had a pretty good turnout. Plenty of teams and plenty of things, courtesy of the Thingomatic. Which worked fine, although it was a bit hungry on the battery side.

Before we started coding we had talks from Lee Stott (Windows 10), Nick Smith (Marmalade) and Dean Ellis (MonoGame). And then, after lunch Simon Jackson gave a talk about Unity. Great stuff, turning the event into a mini-conference as well as a hackathon.

The serious development started in the afternoon. We had the run of our large computer lab, which had been specially re-imaged with Windows 10 just for the event.

This is the team from Hull College who were using the cross platform abilities of Windows 10 to deploy a game across desktop, phone and Raspberry Pi. And it worked too. I took lots more pictures of the event. You can find them here.

Of course we had pizza. And of course there was plenty.

One of the prizes is an "Xbox Onsie". David and Simon couldn't resist putting them on and modelling them...

When I left everyone was settling down for the night. My plan was to come back early and get cracking on my game....

Three Thing Game Thingomatic Lives

We are holding a Windows 10 gaming event at the end of this week. It's going to be a Three Thing Game, which is great, but we aren't going to have an auction for the things this time. 

For this competition we will be using the newly created Thingomatic (patent pending). You can see it above. It is an Arduino linked to a tiny associative word database that I got from those awfully nice people at Akafugu. You just press a button and you get three four letter things that are related in some way. I'm going to let each team press the button three times and pick the best three things from what comes up. Should be fun.

And by Thursday I might even have printed a box for it. 

If you are coming to the event, it all starts at 10:00 am on Thursday 11th in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building on the Hull University campus. We will be having introduction sessions there, prior to moving to the Fenner computer suite for the actual development. 

It's going to be great fun. 

Hull Windows 10 Three Thing Game - Still Time to Register

The event is filling up nicely, but we still have room for a few more folks if you want to come along. The labs are being imaged, the things are being polished and it all starts next Thursday.

If you've registered we'll have "Things on the Day" for you to base your game on, or you can have your things next Monday. Keep an eye on your mailbox for details of the all important "Thing Picking" process.

If you are in Hull next Thursday-Friday (11th and 12th of June) then you really should come along. We've got Microsoft, MonoGame and Marmalade coming along. And Unity, which doesn't begin with M, but we are giving it a free pass this time. And it is Middleware, so I guess that counts.

Anyhoo, you can find out the precise programme and sign up here:

http://www.threethinggame.com/

Remember, this is a special event in that you don't have to be a Hull student to come along (although you'll be most welcome if you do). Any local developer, or out-of-town folks who want to come along and play with Windows 10 game making can come along. And we'll have free pizza. As in PIZZA THAT IS FREE.

Free T Shirts at Windows 10 Three Thing Game

We've just about finalised the itinerary for the Windows 10 Game Jam/Three Thing Game we are holding next month. If you're a developer in the Humberside region you really should come along. We've got sessions about MonoGame, Unity and Marmalade, a room full of Windows 10 machines for you to play with. And Free T Shirts:

Find out the schedule, and sign up, here.

Windows 10 Game Development Event: June 11th-12th

What better way to celebrate the end of the semester than a bit of game creation? Plus a chance to have a play with the latest operating system and development tools.

I'm very pleased to be able to announce a Three Thing Game that we are organising in conjunction with Microsoft. We'll have all kinds of interesting people coming along from Microsoft, local games companies and software houses.

The event is open to any developers who fancy coming along and having a go.

Folks from Hull University are of course welcome, but if you are in a company and want to get hands-on experience working with Windows 10, plus support from Microsoft expertise, then you should come along.

We are working on setting up a lab full of Windows 10 machines for you to work on, so all you have to bring along is yourself and a winning smile. Plus you get to join in our "Summer Bash", with lashing of pizza, video games and perhaps even a game of Werewolf.

It all happens over 11th-12th of June. We've got some presentations on Thursday morning, followed by an afternoon of coding, then the Summer Bash, some late night development and judging and presentations on Friday. With prizes.

If you've never done a game jam before, come along and find out what they are all about. If  you're a Three Thing Game veteran we'd love to see you back in Hull.

You can find out more here: https://www.gamejam10.com/?CR_CC=200617217 (but don't worry about bringing your own machine - we are sorting that out at the moment)

You can sign up here: https://london.gamejam10.com/register

If you've no idea what Three Thing Game is all about, take a look at www.threethinggame.com

This is going to be such fun.

Three Thing Game Finals

Hardy survivors...

We had our Three Thing Game competition over this weekend. Just in case I wasn't busy enough writing poetry and whatnot. Anyhoo, great fun was had. A team of stalwart judges, including developers from Smashed Crab Studios, went through the final 17 teams and found us 6 finalists. As is the way of the competition, we had each team present their game at the aptly named finalist presentations. And here they are in no particular order.

Team: "I hope my friends don't bail on me"

Team "I hope my Friends don't bail on me", AKA Jason Powney, showed off the mayhem he had created from "chainsaw", "penguin" and "water". "Penguin Chainsaw Massacre" had tons of bloodthirsty action, with underwater mine hazards and even a sunken wreck. A very polished production.

Team: //TODO

Team //TODO, aka Daniel Masterson, had started of with "ASCII art", "sanctuary" and "error" and built, to our amazement, a 3D rendered graphical game displayed in a console window using text graphics. Something of an awesome technical achievement we reckoned. And the game looked fun to play too.

TEAM: aNOTHER BAD IDEA

Team "Another Bad Idea", aka Robert Chisholm and Adam Thornes had crafted a very neat top down fighting game from "Toilet Plunger", "Small Mammals" and, not surprisingly, "fighting". The game had frantic one on one action as the players acted out the eternal struggle between fox and rabbit using toilet plunger weapons.

Team: You Will Lose

Team "You will Lose", aka Joseph Edwards and Tomasz Kope,c had turned up the particle generators to the max and produced an atmospheric game based on "square", "random" and "shooter". Some nice coloured effects and randomly generated play areas made for good looking gameplay.

Team: One Musketeer

 Team "Four Musketeers" was down to one musketeer by Saturday lunchtime, but that didn't stop them producing a very neat four player shooter game from "Scrapper", "Wombat" and "Hull". The action was fast and smooth, with multiple weapons and you could even use the gun to jump. Can you spot how the thing "Hull" was used?

Team: Bad Computer Pun

Another technical tour-de-force from team "Bad Computer Pun, aka Nick Ross. We advise our students to use Three Thing Game as a place to test out hew game engines and Nick had certainly done that. Matlab is a serious mathematical package designed for serious mathematical stuff. Not for writing games. But the power of Three Thing Game compelled Nick to go against this and craft what is probably the first ever computer game written in Matlab. It is definitely the first ever Matlab game that involves "ostrich", "oasis" and "escape". And it looked pretty good too.

I didn't envy the judges their job as they went out to pick the winners. Thanks go to Warren Viant, Derek Wills, Lindsay West, Jon Purdy, David Parker and the Smashed Crab crew for giving up a Saturday afternoon to help out. Anyhoo, after much detailed discussion they come up with a first and second places, plus a technical achievement award.

First place went to "I hope my friends don't bail on me". The game was commended for the high quality of gameplay, completeness and the way it had stuck very well to the three things.

In second place we had"Another Bad Idea". Their game was singled out for the fun multi-player action and great looking graphics.

The award for Technical Achievement goes to //TODO. You just don't expect people to use shaders in ASCII art games. Awesome stuff.

I'm going to be chasing the teams for videos of their games and I'll update this post with more details when I get them.

Thanks to all the judges, to Lee Stott from Microsoft and Simon Jackson from MonoGame for dropping by and taking a look. And thanks to David Glover for making the Fenner Lab work so well and allowing us all in.

The next step for the teams is to get their game published. I'm going to be running some sessions about game publishing, keep an eye out for them.

Three Thing Game Auction List

If you are looking for the things we are going to auction tomorrow, you can find them here. Enjoy.

Chainsaws, Bottle, Kitchen, sphere, Leonard Nimoy, Hot dates, Bouncing, random, Crew, Chasing, Circuit Diagrams, Small Mammal, Turret, Friendly Fire, Hack, Zombie, Water, The End, Cornflower Blue, Road, Penguins, Dancing, custard, Rail Grinding, Shifty, A sweater that once had sleeves but now does not., Toilet Plunger, Sanctuary, Chess, Parody, Ferrero Rocher, Ninja, Soaring, Skeletor, Base, The King, Castle, Collision, Spooky Skeletons, BiPolarBear, Why-Wolves, Giant Spiders, Errors, Soldier, Chivas, Three Things, fighting, Yeast, Crippling debt, cloak, Rollercoaster, Captain, evolution, growing, Touch, Laser, Fruit, chicken, Something, Euphoria, Scout Salute, Penguin, Fire, Screenshake, , Cardgame, Railway, 2D, Doge, Oasis, Scratch, Badgers, Triangles, Tycoon, Communism, A man standing on a chair yelling wildly about marsupials., Joke, War, snakes, Beards, Platform, Disembodied Beards that Kill People, Alchemical Horrors and Fun, monkey, Bubble, Space, Sea, Baddie, Flying, The Fanta Gang, Colour, Pinball, Cat girls, A Bitcoin-Based Serial Killer, Queue, Spanking, The One Ring, ManBearPig, LegendFace, Uncommented Code, Balls, Ostrich, Beer, cooking, Escape, boomerang, Gore, Nerd, lasers n stuff, Mechanical Gears, shooter, 404 Error, dragon, Skeletons, spacehopper, Road, Solar Eclipse, Bandit, Obama, cactus, pixel, Fox, Shark, Cars, Ice, Arcade, Sword, Cool, N/A, Dragons, Horror, Jam, square, Grey, Wildcard, Burger King, Power-ups, 400 Tiny Bears, ASCII art graphics, Chairs, Fish, nothing, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Pirate, Robot, Cue, log stove, pies, Magic, Black hole, Defense, copious amounts of food, XNA, Death, Hull, Scrapper, Wombat, Bees, Badminton, Clouds

Making a Three Thing Game Auction Timer Unversal App

We are having the Three Thing Game thing auction next Monday. This is always a giggle. Teams bid "Bank of Thingland" money for things that they want to add to their games. This year all the things are student suggestions. What could possibly go wrong?

Anyhoo, one problem with the auction is that we need to get through over 120 lots in around half an hour, so the auction rate has to be frenetic. Last year I thought I'd solved the problem by fixing the auction length at 15 seconds and creating a countdown timer. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the result of this was that everyone sat waiting until the timer counted down and then tried to snipe with bids at the last minute.

So this time I'm trying something new. A random countdown timer that runs for between five and 15 seconds. Teams won't know when the auction is going to end, so they'd better get their bids in as soon as they can.

Of course this means I'll need a timer. I wrote one this evening and it took around half an hour. And for that I've got Windows Phone and Windows desktop versions.

These are the variables in the program. I use a DispatcherTimer to generate interrupts. I keep a flag to say whether or not the timer is ticking and I have a counter and a limit value which are used to manage the time outs.

This code sets up the timer. It ticks every second. The timer_Tick method is called each time the timer ticks. I also make a copy of the Foreground colour of the text so that I can put the timer digits back to the original colour when the timer is restarted.

This code sets the timer ticking. If the timer is already ticking the method returns straight away. Otherwise the timer is set up, the screen colour put back to normal, a random timeout between 5 and 15 seconds selected and the timer starts.

This is the third method. It runs each time the timer goes tick. If the timer is active we increment the counter and then display it. Next we check to see if we have hit our limit. If we have a sound effect is played and the counter text block is turned red. Then we stop the timer.

All this code is shared between the Windows Phone and Windows Desktop versions and it works a treat. Great stuff.

Red Nose Day + Three Thing Game + Pink Tutu : What could go wrong?

A note for your diaries folks. On Friday 13th of March I'll be doing one of my (in)famous Lectures in Rhyme in aid of Comic Relief. You can find out more (and sponsor me) here. You can also marvel at the strange distortion of my face in the picture. Or perhaps I always look like that. Ugh. 

Anyhoo, after the fun and frivolity of the lecture we'll be embarking on a Red Nose Day themed Three Thing Game. We'll have "rent a thing" events and allow you to exchange your real money for extra "Bank of Thingland" pounds to get more auction winning powers.

My fundraising target is £1,500. If we reach that before the event I will do the lecture wearing a pink tutu. Apparently you can get away with a lot of stuff in the name of charity.....

Making a Universal MonoGame Project

At one of the sessions earlier this week we were talking about game development and I found out something really interesting. Thanks to Giles for passing me the link.

If you want to make a MonoGame solution that contains a Universal Application for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 you can find a build of MonoGame that contains templates that just work here.

You can deploy to phone or pc just by setting the start project. The distribution also contains the new content management stuff. I'm going to make an example application and a little screencast about how to use it when I get back to the UK.

This is completely wonderful. It will make it so much easier to make games which will be rady for both the Windows Phone and the Windows stores.

Halloween Three Thing Game Kicks Off

Three Thing Game is going strong, and I'm sad. We've got over 150 students in the department working on games overnight and I'm not going to see what they have made.

Thanks to the vagaries of airline ticket pricing (who knew it would cost so much to fly on Sunday) I have to head out the MVP Summit on Saturday morning, leaving the event in the capable hands of David.

We started the event with a fantastic presentation from Dean and Dominique about MonoGame. A few things of note from the session:

• A really good way to make a name for yourself (and get jobs etc etc) is to get involved with the Open Source projects.
• You should publish what you make. The first one probably won't be an overnight success. But the fifth one might be.
• MonoGame is all grown up, with versions for pretty much every platform including the PS4 (and I reckon the Xbox One won't be far behind)
• The new Content Management stuff is awesome

Of course we had pizza. Five hundred pounds worth of pizza.

Lee and Simon building a "pizza fort". 

I think we managed to feed everyone OK. The lass on the phone at Domino's listened with increasing incredulity as the order built up, and they had to send out two pizza packed cars to deliver it.   Thanks so much to Lee from Microsoft for sponsoring all the cheesy goodness.

I took a bunch of pictures before I had to zoom off and pack. Above is a sample. You can find them all here.

Three Thing Game Monogame/XNA Rather Useful Seminar

Did a Rather Useful Seminar all about Monogame and XNA today. I took a screencast of the video which you can find above. If you want the sample program code you can find it here. If you want the slides you can find them here.

Three Thing Game Auction Fun and Games

We had our Three Thing Game auction today. We had around 150 things to auction and around 50 minutes to do it. I had sterling support from Mo and two Caitlins (thanks for coming folks) and I set the timer on each round to 15 seconds per thing. I reckoned we should be OK.  

We weren't. Not sure why, but 45 minutes in we still had a whole slew of things to get rid of. So in the end we just dished out the last lot and ran for the door.

We also noticed that "auction sniping", beloved of eBay, made an appearance for the first time ever. Bidders would wait until the very last second and then shout out a large number. One chap did that and outbid himself massively, which was amusing, but it did make it rather hard to work out what was going on. 

Caitlin suggested that we might make the length of each auction random, say between five and ten seconds. I thing this is a great idea, we'll definitely do that next time. 

Anyway, if you turned up with money and hope, plus a desire to get something which was at the end of the list, I'm sorry that you didn't get what you wanted. There's always next time....

Three Thing Game Starts Monday

Spent a big chunk of today updating spreadsheets and printing and cutting out cash for the Three Thing Game Thing Auction tomorrow. We've got 46 teams and 140 or so folks turning up, which will be great.

If you are in a team we will be auctioning all the things at 2:15 tomorrow (Monday) in Lecture Theatre 1 in the Hardy Building. You can find a list of the things that will be going under the hammer here. We have around 150 things to auction in 50 minutes, so you'll have just 15 seconds per lot to make up your mind....

Halloween Three Thing Game Registration Now Open

Registration is now open for the Halloween Three Thing Game. Scary stuff. 

We've got all kinds of goodness lined up for you, including the MonoGame crew, Microsoft, teams of world beating academic staff (maybe) and some distinguished Three Thing Game alumni who now write games for a living. 

I'm particularly keen that First Year students get involved, even if you are not on a game development course. Just treat the competition as a great way to get experience writing code. This is also true if you've not programmed before coming to university. I'll be releasing a template C# game that will serve as the basis for your gaming ideas and should make it dead easy to take part.

For the first time ever we are also holding a "Thing Lecture" on the Friday night from MonoGame, who will be revealing to the world the latest additions to their wonderful game development platform. 

You can find out more, and download a registration form, from here.

Dates for your Diaries

I've been sorting out dates and stuff for the next few weeks. Here are a couple highlights of the things coming up soon:

Rather Useful Seminars

Rather Useful Seminars start this week with a session about the Arduino device, and why you should buy at least one. You can find details of the seminar program at www.ratherusefulseminars.com

Anyone at Hull can come along, they are always at 1:15 on a Wednesday afternoon in Lecture Theatre A on the ground floor of the Robert Blackburn Building. If you fancy giving all, or part of a seminar on something you find interesting and other folk might like to know about, get in touch with me.

Three Thing Game

The date and time for the next Three Thing Game has been set as overnight on Halloween, from 31st of October to 1st November. Microsoft and MonoGame will be coming along to take part and MonoGame will be doing a special, spooky, session about the new features they have added to the framework. You can get extra prizes by using these in the games that you make during the competition.

The itinerary for Three Thing Game is at www.threethinggame.com

Registration for the competition will open next week. 

Flat Out from Smashed Crab Studios

Later this week I'll be doing my talk to the new First Year students. I'm going to mention Three Thing Game. This is our game development hackathon that we hold each semester.  Teams have three "things" that they can use as the basis of a game. We have a 24 hour development session, followed by the judging, followed by sleep.

It is always fun. Last time the team "Rusty Spoons", who have taken part in pretty much every Three Thing Game during their time at Hull, ended up with "Mayhem", "Puzzler" and "of Fun". They made this really neat game which involved linking colours and then flying through them. You can see a rather shaky video of their entry here. 

Their game has metamorphosed into Flat Out, which is now on sale in the Android and Windows Phone stores. And getting good reviews too. The team have now graduated, which is nice, and formed a game studio, which is even nicer. 

I make the point that Three Thing Game can be the start of something big, and that we see the trajectory as one where you start with a silly idea and end with an application in the marketplace. It's great when you actually see that happen. 

Spooky Three Thing Game

We are holding our next Three Thing Game at the end of October. Right at the very end in fact. Over Halloween from Friday 31st October to November 1st. Spooky eh?

Any of our students can take part and with a bit of luck lots of First Year students will sign up and join in. It is a great way to get programming, even if you don't really see yourself as a games programmer. You learn programming best if you are trying to build something and what better way than by trying to make something playable out of "Eiffel Tower, Underwater and Flying Fish"? Indeed.

If you are a Hull graduate and fancy coming back for a dose of Three Thing fun and games please get in touch with me directly and I'll see what I can do. If enough folks want to come back I'll set up a "Three Thing Alumni Tacky Prize" for the best effort from past stars.

One thing to remember though, the event runs from Friday to Saturday, starting Friday evening and then ending on Saturday night. This means that if you are in a job you might have to take some time off if you want to come along. Or tell the boss that you are on an "outreach visit" and dish out a few business cards when you turn up.......

Three Thing Game@School Video

Rob Miles, lecturer at the University of Hull, describes the University's 'Three Thing Game @ School' competition which was held on 15 July 2014. The event involved around sixty school pupils wrestling with Python programming and writing games.

On Tuesday Rachel came round with her posh video camera (and tripod) and took a lovely video of the Three Thine Game@School event, which you can watch if you like. Note how I'm heavily channeling my nerd-power, with a pen in my top pocket...