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Fotos from the computer games course

Emptying the TF card of my phone I finally uploaded some photos from the final presentations to Flickr. It’s just five from my camera phone, but I hope to get another batch from a colleague.

Links

• My photostream @ Flickr

Report from the Games Convention :: Day 1

Today in the morning I came back from Leipzig, where I visited the Games Convention (GC). I was there to find find potential industry partners and people interested in cooperation with the university. Unfortunately at the Games Convention (GC) you need to have an appointment to meet someone as most interesting people are fully booked. However at some places I was lucky. I talked to a very helpful product manager of RTL-Games, a very interested technical account manager of Emergent Game Technologies and a PR assistant of NCSOFT. Also the sales manager of Techland was open to a short talk. Most negative experience was Crytek, where on the one hand someone had time to talk to me, but on the other expressed that they were only interested if I either came from a really big college with a lot of students or I had a lot of money to give them. Perhaps I just spoke to the wrong person … or they need the money for their development gear as Cryengine is known to take a lot of resources. For many of the approached companies the right people had no time, but people at the reception gave me contact information or took my business card to think about my efforts. All in all I am pleased with the first day leaving aside Crytek and Koch Media.

And now for the fun part: I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky in the pre-release version and let it crash several times. The game looks just like the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - just a little better. I’m looking forward to the release. I played Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (Ubisoft) with my butt on the Wii with the creative director of the game throwing snowballs at me. That was real fun I also watched some Spore (EA) and tested it myself for the DS. I played the new Street Fighter 4 game (Capcom) and lost 2:0 in button smashing to a stranger. I tried the new Need for Speed Undercover and I was impressed by the visual damage the car took in crashes. My Audi look kaputt after my 5 minutes test. However behavior of the car is not changed by crashes, just the look of it. Another new racing game is MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. It’s interesting how the developers combined monster trucks and motor bikes in the same game, racing at the same time. Obviously motor bikes are more fun than monster trucks.

A special experience was to play a preview of Sonic Unleashed (Sega) on a HDTV plasma screen. With such a resolution the speed of Sonic is actually fun. Age of Conan was also here with a kind of LARP battle camp with computers inside. Interesting part was the option to play Conan with three TFTs: I call this “3D cave for the poor”. It should transports the feeling of “being inside” better than with a single screen. The feeling is somewhat limited, but its actually there. At EA I tried the preview of the new Harry Potter for the Wii and battled one EA merchandising guy with my wand. It’s now in the same class of games everyone does for the Wii: Instead of button smashing its more like controller swinging. It’s interesting how fast a new input concept can look old.

The new Call of Duty game and Fallout 3 where completely overloaded although only trade visitors were allowed, so I didn’t get a glimpse of those. However those “most prominent” 3D ego shooters where not the critical mass of the GC. Most people played Guitar Hero World Tour (Activision) featuring a band of 4 people with singing, drums, bass and lead guitar. There was a huge lot of sets on at least 4 locations within the GC. Never seen so great many people fooling around with plastic instruments. All in all I was impressed by the big fuss everyone is making about their own games. Most publishers obviously have enough money for PR.

Games implementation week for high school students

Today an activity week for high school students at Klagenfurt University ended. The high school students chose a topic and worked a week on an implementation. Due to the success of our computer games course there was a topic on computer games. The two university students, Christian and Daniel, who instructed and helped the high school students throughout the whole week, did a very good job and several impressive arcade games were implemented within the week.

For me it was great to see what interested high school students can manage in one week. I’ll remember and tell students in my course about it

Compute Games Course @ Klagenfurt University: Project Presentations

The computer games course at Klagenfurt University comes to an end tomorrow and all the students’ projects will be presented. The very best project (voted for by the audience) gets an XBox 360, sponsored by Microsoft. I’m very happy to announce also an industry talk of Stefan Berger, Product Manager of JoWood (11am-12am). The event takes place from 9.30 am to ~5 pm in HS 1 at Klagenfurt University. Feel free to join the audience.

Links: 

• Detailed program (scroll down a bit)
• JoWood

Computer Games: Parallax Scrolling & Sprites

Currently I’m preparing for giving my talk next Friday in the computer games lesson on multimedia issues in games. To underline my words and slides with some code I also coded some easy little Java program visualizing sprite animation and some star field background. The coding was great fun - the third scrolling shooter I coded … always a pleasure

However there is one thing I found out while coding: Ready to use sprite animation image stripes are hard to get. There is a little tool called simple explosion maker” that came handy and the SpriteLib of Flying Yogi is rather cool, but I miss the great deal of online creative commons content. Perhaps one could point me there

Related links:

• Simple explosion maker - A simple tool for rendering explosions.
• SpriteLib - GPL-ed sprites of Flying Yogi

Computer games lecture update: Industry talks

As already blogged we offer this semester a course on computer game development at Klagenfurt University. Now three industry talks are confirmed:

• Stefan Berger from  JoWooD Productions Software AG will talk about game development projects discussing aspects of conceptual work, project management specifics in game dev industry, resources, marketing and QA.
• Andreas Olipitz from OSIOS Online Platforms GmbH will talk about multiplayer games on the browser platform. OSIOS develops such a multiplayer game: Project Deep Space.
• Microsoft will also send a speaker and has sponsored an XBox for the best student project.

All the talks as well as the presentation of the students projects will take place on June 20, 2008. If you are somewhere around Klagenfurt and you like to join us (without being enrolled) drop me a mail in advance

Small Games for Kids - New Release

Besides the two already existing games (GuessWhat and Soundmachine, more information here) I added a new one called SoundVis. The main idea is to animate a kid to make sounds by for instance clapping or yelling. The louder the sound the bigger the blue circle in the center gets. While this sounds trivial it is great fun Note that the microphone has to be functional. A simple test is included in the start screen of SoundVis.

Installation:

Find the new package (including source, licensed under GPL) here. Use 7-zip to unzip them. Launchers (.exe files) for windows are included. Linux users might peek at the included batch files to get a clue how to start the games.

Courses in Summer Semester 2008

Semester started yesterday and therefore also the courses. This semester I’m lecturer and coordinator for 3 courses:

• Multimedia Information Systems - My very own course focusing on Multimedia Retrieval and content based analysis. Takes place 2nd time now, was quite a success the first time: Students and me were satisfied with the agenda of the course and the project results. Find more about it here.
• PR Compiler Construction - A practical course on the basics of compilers to support the compiler construction lecture. There is also a tutorial helping with the implementation tasks of the practical course. Find more information here.
• Computer Games - A first try with my colleague Horst Pichler to create a new course on computer game development bringing together the knowledge of the faculty. While we only had 30 free places in the course and the first lesson will be next week we expect ~ 90 students, which is quite a lot for not mandatory courses in Klagenfurt. Find out more here.

Nonogram for iPhone and iPod Touch

While I’m not Apple’s best fan I contributed my (sparse) mathematical knowledge for a Nongram puzzle for the iPod Touch, which was implemented by a long term friend of mine:

• In the Apple WebApps listing
• The game itself

While its actually played on devices named like a popular fruit one can also play them in a browser named like a burning mammal.