The recent upgrade of  facilities for this course has been greatly appreciated by students. The exemplary use of blackboard as a timely communication tool particularly stood out to the panel as a leading example of how virtual learning spaces can be used effectively.

Well done to everyone involved in delivering this programme!

“The Seven Day Gentlemanly Game Challenge”, as organised by Sean Oxspring, has officially started today. It is a week-long Game Developing Challenge for any students and staff in the Lincoln School Of Computer Science to take part in! As the name suggests, The Seven Day Gentlemanly Game Challenge will require you and a team of up to four others to make a game based around the general theme of gentlemanliness and well-to-do things (e.g. top hats, monocles, steampunk etc.) in seven day’s time! Ladies are also very welcome and highly encouraged to partake in this challenge, of course.

We announced that mechanics from a voting poll will be used for the challenge. The mechanics are:

[Survival], either [Rock, Paper, Scissor] or [Round-Based]

We are hoping that you will be able to come up with innovative and creative ideas based on the themes we are giving you. If you are finding it difficult to come up with an idea – do not panic. You have a whole week and plenty of time to develop your game! Please recall that both themes must be used in your game to be eligible to enter the competition.

Feel free to chat about your game development towards the game challenge on Facebook, Blogs and Twitter! We even got our own hashtag: #7DGC .

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Sean Oxspring for any enquiries!

Voting is now closed!

It is time once again to spend a week doing what everyone loves – developing awesome video-games! Based on the success of The Seven Day Game Challenge, Sean Oxspring has decided to put on another game-jam to celebrate the end of the year and the founding of his new games company Top Notch Studios – The Seven Day Gentlemanly Game Challenge!

As the name suggests, The Seven Day Gentlemanly Game Challenge will require you and a team of up to four others to make a game based around the general theme of gentlemanliness and well-to-do things (e.g. top hats, monocles, steampunk etc.) in seven day’s time! Ladies are also very welcome and highly encouraged to partake in this challenge, of course.

Similar to last year, there is a voting process involved, this time around, partakers are requested to vote on the game mechanics the games that are being developed should include! Click here to vote! Choose up to three mechanics to vote for. You can vote once every six hours. Please recall that you can win up to £100 of gentlemanly prizes!

If you are interested in participating in The Seven Day Gentlemanly Game Challenge, then come along to Complab B, 3rd floot MHT Building, at 5:00PM on Friday 24th May 2013. Bring your team of designers, programmers and artists. In this session we will be going over the rules of the game jam and revealing the extra mechanics that you game must include!

We’ll see you there, and let’s make some jolly spiffing games! Ho, ho, fabulous!

Epic Games released the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) in late 2009, as a Standalone Development Kit (SDK) for Unreal Engine 3 (UE3). To support their standalone release, Epic Games spawned an entire developer community comprising forums, technical documentation and video tutorials.

Mastering UDK Game Development Hotshot builds on the community foundations laid by Epic Games, aiming squarely at advanced UDK users. The author, John P. Doran, is a software engineer working for DigiPen Institute Singapore, with experience working in the games industry, as well as higher education. He co-authored UDK iOS Game Development Beginner’s Guide. The Hotshot series comprises two games development titles, and seven technical topics , including Adobe CS6 and jQuery. 

The flexibility of UDK is greatly demonstrated throughout this book. It looks beyond the standard out-of-the-box first person shooter that UDK provides and focuses on how to use UDK as a game development tool for any genre. The project based nature of the book keeps the content fresh, and challenges readers onto further work. Mastering UDK Game Development Hotshot is aimed at designers and non-programmers who will use the editor based tools of UDK.

Each chapter is formatted to each cover a practical project, with sub-chapters tackling the more specific elements entailed within each project. The book steers away from touting the features of the engine and focuses on how to use the engine as a general development tool. This means covering useful topics such as creating a custom HUD for an RPG, creating loot and managing a loot system, as well as enriching environment and user interface. Strong emphasis is given to UI creation using Flash tool Scaleform. Advanced application of Kismet features heavily in this book, with code segments being well explained and reusable.

The UnrealScript primer at the end of the book is very blinkered in terms of application and scope, and does not add anything more than Epic Games have provided. It would have been nice to see a larger portion dedicated to UnrealScript, because used in combination with the level editor, Unreal Development Kit becomes a very flexible and usable development platform.

The book is available in both traditional printed version and as a PDF eBook via Packt’s website. The PDF version was reviewed, and features a fully linked Table of Contents and Index system. Each chapter spans approximately 30 pages and has lots of colour screen captures with clear and concise explanations. There is an online repository for resources used in the book.

Mastering UDK Game Development Hotshot is an excellent book if you have exhausted Epic’s tutorials and are looking to hone your skills using the UDK editor.

The short summer course provides undergraduate students from all universities with an opportunity to learn about computer games development in a fun, supportive, and productive environment.

This is a ten day residential course running from 19th-30th August 2013. Overseas students are welcome!

Visit gamessummerschool.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk for more information!

“#1GAM inspires people and promotes the creation of games” says Alex, “The challenge strongly encourages developing, finishing and releasing great games. There aren’t really any rules, so it ties perfectly with other game jams.” Alex is currently a first year Games Computing student and has submitted a handful of games to the competition. “The challenge doesn’t force you to work on each game for exactly a month, you can release as many as you want in whatever time frame you want – the point is just to get people making more games. #1GAM is more of a target than a game jam.”

Sean is currently in the final stages of his BSc Games Computing course. “It is interesting”, says Sean, when asked about what he thinks of the #1GAM challenge, “It requires people to be really self-motivated which is not always easy. But if you can drive yourself to submit those games, then you have really accomplished something amazing. You can also meet a lot of developers, learn a lot, make full games, get them played by many people.”

Feel free to have a peek at Alex’s games and Sean’s submissions. Below is a video about Alex’s most recent submission dubbed “A Game about Squares”. Are you currently working on a #1GAM submission? What do you think of Sean’s and Alex’s submissions? Feel free to comment below!

]]> http://games.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/05/starting-a-game-is-easy-finishing-a-game-is-hard/feed/ 0 http://games.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/04/announcement-research-seminars-richard-bartle/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=announcement-research-seminars-richard-bartle http://games.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/04/announcement-research-seminars-richard-bartle/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:38:07 +0000 Olivier Szymanezyk http://games.lincoln.ac.uk/?p=1126

The well known games industry figure, Professor Richard Bartle, will return to the University of Lincoln to give a talk about his recent video-games related work.  Professor Richard Bartle is considered as one of the pioneers of the massive online game industry, and authored the most comprehensive treatment of virtual world design to-date book entitled “Designing Virtual Worlds”. He will discuss the narrative aspects and storytelling in video-games.

The talk will be given on Friday, 26th April 2013 between 15:00 – 16:00  in the Jackson Lecture Theatre, which is situated in the Main Building of the campus. No registration is required, just pop to the lecture theatre on time. We hope to see you all there!

Canjam 2013 was the second major video-game jam organised by the University of Lincoln Computing Society (ULCS) in cooperation with the Lincoln School of Computer Science (LSoCS). Based on the major success of the ULCS GameJam in 2012, CanJam attracted over 70 competitors, regardless of their background, knowledge, experience or ability to get their hands dirty developing a video-game in less than twenty four hours. Developers from the video-games industry (Crytek GmbH and Rockstar Games) judged games based on their originality, juiciness, fun-factor and best use of the given themes. Over £500 worth of prizes were awarded to the category winners alongside many honourable mentions.

This year, the crowd-sourced themes were based on objects and concepts. On Saturday morning, competitors were requested to submit one object (.e.g. moustaches) and one concept (e.g. smuggling) into the theme suggestion box. Judges chose the most fun and original contribution. This year, they settled on the themes of Uranium (object) and Madness (concept). Following the announcement of the themes, participants rushed towards their teams to discuss game ideas, development plans and workload distributions. Actually, some of them preferred to head towards the local pubs to find some much required inspiration.

CanJam 2013 had a great line-up of representatives of the video-games industry, including Rockstar Games and Crytek GmbH. They took their time throughout the event to chat to all participants, and they provided useful feedback on the games. On Sunday afternoon they independently judged every game submission throughout the game presentation session on Sunday afternoon. Judging was described as a most difficult task, as the judges strongly believed that all of the submissions were worth a prize.

We highly recommend to have a peek at the two minutes team interviews of Canjam 2013 participants on YouTube. Furthermore, some participants uploaded videos of their submissions (e.g. Atomic 92 Uranium Madness, Totally Illogical Meltdown). Additionally, Dmunkeys (GameArt Jinx) wrote a brilliant blog post about their experiences at CanJam, Oxyoxspring describes CanJam as the most tiring yet pleasurable Game-Jam experience, and David Saltares, one of the Crytek GmbH judges, underlines the tremendous effort of the organisers and takes his hat off for all participants.

There were more than 200 pictures taken throughout the event. They are all available on the public Canjam Facebook Page. We wish to thank Jonathan Woodliffe and Joshua O’Rourke (Follow him on Twitter) for their photography skills!

This was a great opportunity to show off students’ skills, to enjoy great fun times with other similarly minded people, to develop a game in teams up to four and to create a great piece of work for their portfolio!

See you all next year for CanJam 2014!

Kindly, David agreed to share his slides with us, which should be visible below, or available here.

Cheers David!

“Just go make something. But really you want to do more than that. You want to create something, then you want to release it, you want feedback on it and you want to keep getting better.” - Chet Faliszek (Valve) to budding game developers.

Throughout their studies of becoming successful game-scholars, 1st year Games Computing students at the Lincoln School of Computer Science are being thought about game design tools to quickly develop and extend original game ideas into fully fledged playable games. The use of game developing challenges is one of our favourite approaches to the introductory of game studies. The rules of the challenge: Make a game based on a given theme, within the available time scale. Volunteering students present and discuss their game in front of a playful crowd made out of their colleagues and university staff members. The given theme for this challenge is “One Button Games” – games that use a range of mechanics based around the idea that a player may only use one button only. Such games are fairly popular amongst casual games such as “B.U.T.T.O.N“, “Super Action RPG” or “Canabalt“. Recently, Gamasutra wrote a rather extensive article about the game design recommendations for One Button Games.

We are very pleased to share with you some of the submissions for the 2012 One Button Game Challenge. Feel free to have a look at the video, download and play the games!

Furthermore you can find the results of the 2011 Game Challenges using the following links: One Button Challenge 2011 / ASCII Challenge 2011. Enjoy the games, and feel free to share them with your friends and family!

	Legend of Groomp by Alex Saye  (Contact) A tower defense game where you must defend against hordes of soldiers using up to nine different spells. Spells are cast by either tapping or holding the Space bar. Get experience by killing enemies to unlock more spells. Spells can be stacked on top of each other and combined – for instance, fire spreads easily to other enemies if used with the spell push! Download (PC Windows)
	Volley Orange by Jamie Bloor  (Contact) Collect all the gold apples using the oranges to proceed to the next level! Can you find the optimal way through all the levels? Download (PC Windows)
	Balloon Button by Mike Thompson (Contact) Control a hot air balloon through a vast and rich environment! Collect the sheep to get more points, and grab the fuel to fly even further! Download (PC Windows)