Outgoing Seniors Develop Multiplayer,
Online Videogames for Software Design Course
By Doug Ramsey I June 13, 2005
Computer science students don't usually draw a crowd of onlookers for their final exam. But the nearly three dozen seniors who took CSE 125 this quarter drew a standing-room-only crowd in Peterson Hall on June 3, as fellow students, faculty and bystanders packed the auditorium to watch - and even play - five online videogames created by the students from scratch.
"The course is called software system design and implementation, but most people call it 'the games course,'" says Geoff Voelker, the computer science and engineering professor who teaches the senior design course every spring. "The goal is to let students experience the design and implementation of a large, complex software system in large groups."
To make the class exciting as well as challenging, the project is a distributed, real-time, 3D, multiplayer game of each group's design. The course gave students a chance to show off all the skills they developed over the previous four years.
"These projects reflect the outstanding independence, initiative and problem-solving skills of the class," says Voelker, "It's impressive to watch them come up with these amazing games in just ten weeks."
Like previous years, most of the games fell into the category of so-called 'first-person shooter' games, but with a twist. "We didn't want something modern, so we went for something a little older, with arrows," says Fred Lionetti, who worked on a Sherwood Forest-themed game, Robin Hood: Knights and Thieves. "We even decided to have randomly generated trees and other objects, to make the game much more dynamic than many video games. No two trees are identical."
The team that created Campus Cart created a blend of first-person shooting and racing, with all the action set on the UCSD campus, with vivid graphics of landmarks including the Sun God sculpture. "Everybody else does shooter games, but we didn't want to do that, so we created a cart-racing game," says Andrew Song. "But then we decided it would also be cool if we could also shoot at each other." Each cart represents a campus publication (UCSD Guardian, The Koala etc.) and the object of the game is to get as many readers as possible.
Voelker says this year's games showed even more creativity than usual, in part because most of this year's teams included an Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM) student. "So rather than use existing models found on the web, the ICAM students did their own modeling, textures, and animation," explains Voelker.
Upping the creativity quotient among this year's games: an airborne shoot-'em-up called: Superschüle-Mädchen-Stadt Deathmatch Zwei that features flying penguins that double as heat-seeking missiles, and oversized red rockets called CHMs (short for 'comically huge missiles').
Although each videogame is the team's final project, CSE 125 also emphasizes the development process itself, and teamwork. "Students are working in groups of six or seven people and that's an important lesson for the real world," says Voelker. "They solved all the problems themselves."
Several of this year's students had so much fun in the course that they would like to be able to design videogames for a living. That's nothing new, says Voelker. "Around 20 percent of the students in the class would like to get jobs in the game industry," he said. "Some of our recent years' graduates have already been working at local game companies for two or more years."
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