Indie Game The Movie – The Screening

We would like to invite you to the screening of “Indie Game: The Movie” – an inspiring documentary about independent game developers, their lives, problems, unique ways of looking at reality and obviously the indie game titles they released onto the XBLA platform. It includes Team Meat (Super Meat Boy), Polytron (Fez), and Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness).

The screening is going to take place on 10th of October, 15:00, Jackson Lecture Theatre, Main Building. The movie is 103 minutes long.

Any student interested in Indie Game Development is welcome to attend!

Upgrades!

To celebrate the start of the new study year, the computer labs within the Lincoln School of Computer Science has received some significant hardware upgrades. Our technician, Tom Feltwell, has worked diligently and endlessly throughout the summer and has concocted a selection of most powerful computer hardware which were recently delivered and installed within our premises. Computing students will now be able to fully enjoy the state-of-the-art hardware for studying and development purposes: Intel i5 3570K Processors, Asus P8Z77-M Pro, 16Gb DDR3 RAM, NVidia Geforce GT 640.

Furthermore, the current monitors will be soon replaced with 24″ widescreen monitors. Hooray!

Student Post: Project Dugong – From Experiment to Serious Ambition

“What started as a group of students completely overestimating their skills at a GameJam is now a very ambitious team, eager to make their own fully developed video games.” – Martin Smith, Team Nigel’s Unity Developer.

Team Nigel is the mind child of four University of Lincoln Games Computing/Production students, after they worked together as a team throughout the ULCS Game Jam 2012 in late March earlier this year. Given 24 hours to make a game, they cobbled together Sheer Bloody Madness, which they describe as a “crazy Viking out for revenge in a mindless hack and slash adventure”. It won an honourable mention by the judges, which were made out of developers and academics from Crytek, RockStar, LiSC, ULCS and the LSoCS. Later, the game became the source of inspiration for Team Nigel’s current work, which has been codenamed Dugong.

Dugong is the current on-going project that Team Nigel came up with to introduce themselves into the world of video-games development. Since the ULCS GameJam 2012, they have made great progress and learned much about various aspects of making fun and entertaining video-games in a team-oriented environment. They describe their current game as following: You play a character (Called “You”) in ancient times whose village gets destroyed by evil forces. This incites You to go on a violent and revengeful rampage. The player controls the game character using typical third person views through a story-heavy hack & slash background.

When it comes to the design of the game, Team Nigel’s general approach is to throw anything at the project, as long as it’s considered as fun. Although the game relies heavily on a Viking background, they decided not to keep themselves bound to the typical Norsemen lore, but to let their imagination go out of control. Furthermore, magic plays a big part of the game, mastering the four elements is key to getting to the end areas. A currency dubbed “Wonga” is used to buy equipment, consumables or to play mini-games to earn more fame.

“We love open worlds, so our game will have exactly that”, says Martin, “We want to throw the player into a land that is full of stuff that lives and works without any player interaction, so they can explore them. Rewards, in form of additional items and insightful lore are given to explorers,  which can be used on their quest to go on. We’re using a very simplistic blocky graphical style for our game. We felt it’s much easier to work with blocks and pixels than it is to create full 3D characters and environments, although we are still debating on the overall style of the game as working with blocks isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to adding details!”

You can follow their progress at www.TeamNigel.co.uk which they update regularly.

Research: Agent Based Crowd Simulation In Airports Using Games Technology.

PhD student Olivier Szymanezyk is currently working on a framework to simulate real-time pedestrian motion in an airport environment using a scalable layered intelligence technique, a physics middleware and the social force model. Olivier and his supervisors Patrick Dickinson and Tom Duckett have recently published their crowd simulation work in papers entitled “Towards agent-based crowd simulation in airports using games technology” and “From individual characters to large crowds: augmenting the believability of open-world games through exploring social emotion in pedestrian groups“, which are accessible through The Lincoln Repository. Recently, Olivier has released a short video showcasing his work. The video has been released on YouTube.

Furthermore, a few screenshots of the most recent iteration of the simulation:

Feel free to share the video, read the related papers and to contact Olivier Szymanezyk if you have any further comments or questions!

 

GameGadget Project

Duncan has been playing with the new retro console ‘GameGadget’. He says it’s great fun playing old Megadrive games in a handheld format, but he is especially looking forward to seeing what new games can be created for the device. If you are interested in a final year project in this area, please send him your ideas via email (drowland@lincoln.ac.uk).