U20 revised final deadline

The revised final deadline for U20 is now:

Monday 4^th January 2010

Must have title graphics for Monday 23rd November 2009

We will start working with the the game engine template code from Monday.

In order for this to work properly you will need to have you graphics and (if possible sound) ready so you can build something relavant to you.

If you don't then you will rapidly get behind and become lost.

Engine3.00 and game template now live

You must not make any attempt to work with this until you have finished all the work required for Unit 20.

Read about the engine here

Wednesday 11th November

Unfortunately I will not be in today, can you please continue to work on either:

• Write up for Jayne's Vista setup, please ensure you are following the guide on pages 8 to 11
• Work on you graphics for the game
• Work on your audio for the game

Please refer to these blog entries  for details of the graphics and audio for more specific details.


I will see you again on Friday.

U20 Referral deadline 20th November 2009

You must hand in your complete U20 on
Friday 20^th November 2009.

Complete means it contains (in order)

• Client Briefs
• Legislation
• Jayne (outline, possible, justified solution, evaluation, report format and recommendation report)
• Hari (outline, possible, justified solution, evaluation, report format and recommendation report)
• Toma (outline, possible, justified solution, evaluation, report format and recommendation report)
• Setup Demonstration complete
• Evaluation of performance
• Bibliography

Your folder must have a contents lists at the start and all corrections must be complete.

You will get your folders back with referral information and the final deadline for all corrected work will be 
Thursday 10^th December. 
If you miss it you will get zero marks.

Half term homework; Client solutions

You need to ensure that when we come back after half term that all documents for all 3 clients are completed (you also need to ensure that the legislation is corrected and complete).

Any corrected work should be placed in your folder. If you have not yet obtained a contents lists for the unit you should ask for one when we come back. It is important that you go through the contents list and check off all your completed documents.

Remember the documents you need for each client are:

Client outline
Discussion of possible hardware/software/configurations
Justified solution with rejections
evaluation of solution
statement of report format
Client focused report

We will start work on the PC set-up task (worth over 20 marks) when we come back, only those that have completed the sets of work for all 3 clients will be chosen to start this:

Those that have completed the task will have time to continue work on graphics and audio for the game unit.

Game Engine benchmarking

Just did some benchmarking of the current game Engine,

Results of new engine will be posted as soon as it is written!!

Click here for details posted in the Engine blog.

Recommended Resolutions for the Game

I have done a bit of research and have decided that you can use the following resolutions when writing your game. The XBOX will automatically make your image fit with the Physical display settings.

Note smaller resolutions will most likely render quicker:

 4:3 resolutions

• 800 by 600
• 640 by 480

 16:9 resolutions (wide screen)

• 853 by 480
• 1280 by 720 (this is actually 720p)

Bear this in mind when creating your graphics (especially your backgrounds)

Homework Two: Legislation research

You need to complete the legislation research tasks over the weekend and next week.

It is important that these get printed and referred by me during next week.

I will expect the corrected versions to be in your folders by the end of next week 25th September 2009

Unit 20 Legislation

The work to complete this week is task (a) Legislation research.

We are aiming to get this completed and referrals marked by the end of the week.

Three components are

• Describe legislation
• Relate to our clients
• identify and discuss actual cases/issues

It is important to make sure you have synthesised the knowledge only copy paste if you are quoting your research, you need to write your own materials for your descriptions and relationships with your clients.

Homework One: Sprites and Audio

Please work on developing your sprites and audio files for your game in preparation for starting after October half term.


Remember to use your Asset list to aid you in identifying work still to be completed. Also remember to update your Asset list, I will want to see them next Friday.
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If you do not have Office 2007 you can get Open Office 3.1 for free from http://www.openoffice.org/ this is an excellent suite of programs with very high compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Games Available to try on XBOX360

I have several full games installed on the XBOX360.

You may wish to look at these to get further ideas for your own games.

Remember you are keeping things simple.

Here are the available full games to try out:

• Bankshot Billards 2
• Every Extend Extra Extreme
• Frogger
• Geometry Wars
• Gyruss
• Hexic HD
• Ikaruga
• R-Type Dimensions
• Rez HD
• Scramble
• Space Invaders Extreme
• Time Pilot
• Track and Field
• Worms
• Trials HD

+ Sega Mega Drive Ultimate collection which includes:

• Alex Kidd
• Alien Storm
• Alien Syndrome Arcade (unlocked)
• Altered Beast
• Bonanza Bros
• Columns
• Comix Zone
• Decap Attack
• Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
• Dynamite Headdy
• E-SWAT
• Ecco the Dolphin
• Ecco: The tides of time
• Fatal Labyrinth
• Flicky
• Gain Ground
• Golden Axe (1, 2 and 3)
• Golden Axe Warrior (unlocked)
• Kid Chameleon
• Phantasy Star (2, 3 and 4)
• Ristar
• Shining Force (1 and 2)
• Shining in the Darkness
• Shinobi Arcade (unlocked)
• Shinobi III
• Sonic & Knuckles
• Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island
• Sonic Spinball
• Sonic the Headgehog (1, 2 and 3)
• Space Harrier Arcade (Unlocked)
• Streets of Rage (1, 2 and 3)
• Super Thunder Blade
• Tip Top Arcade (Congo Bongo unlocked)
• The Story of Thor
• VectorMan (1 and 2)

These will be available during U17 lessons at the start of the year.

Work to be completed over Summer

It is very important that you come back in September with some assets ready for your game.

Assets you need to sort out are:

Layer graphics

Layers contain static graphics, those that don't change or animate.

You can specify a flat colour for your background and overlay graphics on top of that using layers. Layers can be scrolled independently(in any direction and at any speed) and over laid on top of each other with altering the overall colouring or transparency. They can also be placed in front of all sprites on screen, so they appear in front of everything (like you might have on various HUD's).

Here is an example of a single layer graphic used on my Space Invaders high score screen as a static image and on the options screen as a scrolling image Invader back Image.

Each layer can be made up of several tiles (called a tile sheet) to form an image from a series common sized blocks (50x50 is the current default). You can for simplicity create a single large image and have this tiled onto a layer. A single graphic tiled for Space Invaders main game.

I hope to have a tiled graphics layer composer in the next version of the game engine to help with this task of placing tiles onto a layer.

Layers can be theoretically any size (the visible area is 800x600) , but the graphics cards cannot load any individual images larger than 2048x2048. They should be saved in PNG format only. You can then combine multiple images into one large background layer. Here are several large images (2000 pixels wide) which when joined back together make a layer 10,000 pixels wide! layerpart1, layerpart2, layerpart3,layerpart4, layerpart5

If you want any transparent areas on your layer graphics or sprites (you will definitely want this) you need to use a transparent background in your editing program.

Text sprites

There are several pre-defined fonts in the game engine, (fonts provided in game engine - you can create your own if you like place them on a separate tile sheet) these can be displayed in any colour and be made to appear transparent. But if you want to make some text (for game over, press start) that is multi coloured or highlights when selected you will need to use a graphics package to create these - make sure you pick a style and use it across all your text sprites (otherwise it will look naff). You should organise your text sprites onto a tile sheet(s). Example of Sprite Text from Space Invaders option screen. If you want to highlight text on menus one way is to do duplicates with a second highlighting colour (as shown in previous link).

Sprites

Sprites are any moving animating graphics. They are going to be the main and most time consuming graphics to produce. If you want to animate your sprites you will need to define separate graphics for each frame. Here is a simple sprite on a single tile sheet used for a title graphic.

These need to be organised onto a single graphic called a tile sheet. As mentioned above a tile sheet can be no larger than 2048x2048 pixels. If you need to create another tile sheet to fit your sprites on you can. Example tile sheet from Space Invaders. If as in this sheet you make your graphics white they can be dynamically coloured during the game. Please don't worry about making any sprites translucent as this can also be altered by the engine.

Make sure you define your graphic with a transparent background. Make sure if you don't have a graphics package at home such as Fireworks or Photoshop you should donwload GIMP

Sound effects

Sound effects are short noises, clicks, shooting sunds, clangs, explosions, words that are triggered throughout your game. You need to collect all of these over summer (or record them yourself).

You can download Audacity which is the program we use at College for editing audio.

Sound tracks

Be careful with long soundtracks that take up loads of space and take ages to load, try to edit any songs so they are no more than a minute or so long. Again use Audacity for this (you can do nice fade in and fade out effects).

Scores Submitted during last few days

I will keep adding score updates to this blog entry over the next few days. If a score has been submitted for a game you're playing, it may mean that you're score has been beaten, so you should try to submit another score.

19 scores submitted in last 3 days

Arkanoid

Thursday 9th July 2009 - 3 scores submitted

Friday 10th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Berzerk

Wednesday 8th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Bomb Jack

Friday 10th July 2009 - 2 scores submitted

Donkey Kong

Wednesday 8th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Donkey Kong Jr

Green Beret

Wednesday 8th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Friday 10th July 2009 - 2 scores submitted

Mr Do's Castle

Wednesday 8th July 2009 - 3 scores submitted

Pac-Man

Friday 10th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Pengo

Time Pilot

Friday 10th July 2009 - 2 scores submitted

Turbo

Wednesday 8th July 2009 - 1 score submitted

Twin Cobra

Thursday 9th July 2009 - 1 score submitted (to be verified)

Eric

Game Competition ends Friday 4:15pm

Just a reminder that the games competition ends this Friday 1oth July.

I will not be publishing any scores submitted on Thursday and Friday, so if you have a score you should submit it. Those people "doing a Billy Mitchell" will therefore not know if their score is the best or not.

I will state the which games have had scores submitted on this blog over the last few days of the competition, but I will not display the scores.

The prize giving will take place at 1:10 pm Monday 13th July 2009

See you there.

Good luck with the last few days

Eric

Competition is getting fierce

There are some great scores coming in for

Pengo
Mr Do's Castle
Donkey Kong
Arkanoid
Donkey Kong Jr
Twin Cobra
Berzerk
Turbo
Green Beret
Pac-Man

Nobody has entered a score for Bomb Jack (don't be put off by my moderate score)

The Donkey Kong Jr score could go a lot higher if Blake can get past the second bird cage (someone else needs to join him to push his score)

On Time Pilot try not to wiggle around too much, this will cause you to run into bullets and homers more often.

Some games removed from competition

I've decided to remove the following games from the competition:

Burger Time
Mappy
Star Wars
Strider
Time Pilot re-instated

As nobody had submitted any scores for these games.

Lightning strikes !!

I decided to play some games this weekend to give a challenge to those games where only one student has posted a score.

I had a warm up game of 320,950 on Twin Cobra just pipping Sam's score. Then Bang lightning strike machine goes off. It now turns off during boot up, possibly motherboard and or/ hard disk damage (can't get it on long enough to scan disk).

Keep the scores coming.

Game competition 1st week update

There have been 32 scores submitted since Monday.

Competition is fierce on:

Arkanoid
Green Beret
Pac-Man
Pengo
Turbo

No scores have been submitted for the following games:

Bomb Jack
Burger Time
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr
Mappy
Star Wars
Strider
Time Pilot

If you have scores please submit them.

Game summary and Specification overview maps

You need to get your game summaries completed this week. Remember keep it simple but make sure you explain the game and how it is played.

Try not to use other games to describe your game (i.e. don't say "power ups drop like in Arkanoid")

The mind maps need completing with your peer reviews by the end of next week.

Game Competition is Go!

I've decided to open the game competition today.

Scores submitted to me via-email please with screen shot.

Reminder: You can only play during your free lessons (don't interfere with classes going on) or during workshop.

Good luck

5 Games added to game competition

By popular demand:

Berzerk
Burger Time
Star Wars

Have been added to the game competition.

Stop Press, I've also added:

Mr Do's Castle
Turbo

To cover a wider range of games.

Critical Reviews After Play

The game reviews need completing by the end of this week 19th June 2009. Ensure you have created them in detail, we will then need to get these corrected while you are also working on the specification document for your game and front end system.

Game Competition 2009

Double 2nd/Computing 2nd year Game Competition 2009

Students from the Computing 2nd year and Double ICT 2nd year are challenged to compete for the highscore on the following games.

 Arkanoid
 Bomb Jack
 Donkey Kong
 Donkey Kong Jr
 Mappy
 Green Beret
 Pac-Man
 Pengo
 Strider
 Time Pilot
 Twin Cobra

Scores must be submitted with a screenshot showing the scoring achievement via my e-mail.

Updates to the competition will be posted on this blog during the competition.

A scrolling marquee on the main ICT/Computing page will show the top scores. If you go to the U17 section and select High Score System (under How To's) you can see a listing of each students top score submission for each game.

Submissions may be made between the following dates.
29th June 2009 and 10th July 2009 @ 4:15pm
Prizes will be awarded the following week.

Good Luck