Somebody has to develop those video games that keep millions linked to their computer screens, fingers at the ready. Why not Wofford students?
That was the idea behind Dr. Aaron Garrett’s “Intro to Video Game Design” Interim. Using Construct 3, a game development system, his students spent January designing, developing, building and – of course – playing original games on their laptops.
The month began with simple game designs, but, as the students got deeper into their games, they ran into obstacles – much like game players do as they advance from one level to another.
“I was worried that they might give up or simplify their game idea to avoid the problems, but none of them did,” says Garrett, an assistant professor of computer science. “The students were very tenacious about finding solutions to make their games do what they imagined.”
Zhixi “Sunny” Yan ’20, a computer science and physics major from China, designed a “platform” game similar to Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. The goal is to move a character from platform to platform left to right across the screen while avoiding bad guys and various pitfalls.
“It’s hard in that case because I have to test every change so many times,” he says. “But it’s been fun. I’m interested in computer science, and I like gaming stuff.”
Although most students in the class have significant experience playing video games, Emily Moore, a first-year student from Boiling Springs, S.C., was a rookie.
“I’ve never been really computer savvy,” she says, “but it wasn’t hard to figure out most of this stuff.”
Garrett used much of the class time to work individually with students to deal with problems they encounter as they dive deeper into their games.
“Micah Tiffin (was) working on a dodgeball game,” Garrett says. “He (had) a host of issues that he had to solve to make the game he wants – making the enemies intelligently throw their balls at the player and dodge incoming balls, making computer-controlled teammates for the player and giving the player control of a different teammate if he or she is hit by a ball, etc.
“Those are all problems that we never covered together in class, so he spent a lot of time working through those solutions on his own. Usually, he (got) to a point where he worked for a couple of hours and (couldn’t) quite get it to work right. So then I could sit with him for 20 minutes, or sometimes much longer if it was a tough problem, and talked through how he might get to a resolution.”
Sophomore Eric Craft, a computer science major from Anderson, S.C., was building a game he named Glitch. It fits into the Mario platform family.
“I like older video games, like Mario and stuff, and I thought this would be cool,” he says of the class. “This game (took) a few days to do, and, of course, it’s nowhere close to Xbox or PlayStation or any of those games. But the design part has been fun and interesting.”
Prepared by Wofford College.