Every year Games Day is the day when a
whole year of effort comes together
Where teams present their games - first
of all to academics here in Computer
Science but also to the wider public and
to other people from the university.
This year we have 11 games they really
cover the full range. From games for a
single person to games where you have
dozens and dozens of people playing each other
To create a game you have to start from the bottom up. Think about what people  people would want,
what you would enjoy in a game and something that hasn't been done before Which is what we were trying to go for.
We've done a lot
of CS work throughout past three years
this was much more than just CS. We work with composors, we work with artists
we learn to manage big teams. We've had
like 2,400 hours of effort in total in this game.
It feels like being a real
company even though you still at Uni.
It's very different because it's a very
creative project, normally you
have a very specific target you have to
do. This project you have to combine
all your different skills so you need
creativity and you need problem-solving
and teamwork as well as a combination of
all the different things you've learned on the course.
How to go about structuring and
designing a really large project. How to
interact and work with people
particularly in software development so
interacting the team members
the necessities when it comes to
managing a project making sure the project goes well.
Our composor does the film and TV course
here at Bristol he specializes in
ambient music I think it's excellent and
it really adds a lot to our game
Making sure everything was integrated
properly, making sure everything
worked together. We've got five separate
screens three servers making sure that
everything work together and making sure
if one bit did break then the rest
didn't crash entirely as well.
We found that the game engines weren't giving us enough control so we developed everything from scratch,
from the ground up. Something like 13,000 lines of code and many many hours of work.
Every group has different areas of
expertise and things that they're
specialized in throughout the day. Ours in
particular is our AI which
we've implemented using a neural network.
It's a real opportunity for other
developers to come and see the different
kind of modern technologies that the new
programmers of tomorrow are
using
We have a murder mystery game. The
idea is that it's played on Android
phones using Google cardboard only one
person will be the murderer and all you
have to try and figure out who the murderer is.
I'd say it's completely
different to anything we've done before. There's structure
to it but it's not like, "do this here, do this then, and this then". You kind of
organise the whole thing yourselves and has a team you have to get behind it so it's much more like a real world application.
Having led the team as well as seen the
challenges and struggles I think it
really builds you as a person, really
teaches you skills which are really
transferable. This is actually one of the
reasons I picked Bristol because they
have the games project, other Unis don't.
It's really nice to see what is
actually achievable by uni students in
the space of a year. It's definitely
really fun atmosphere on the day as well
Building a game in its own right is an
immense opportunity to produce something
which will carry you possibly further
than a specific lecture series could
So it's an experience for students that
they can take out of their studies for...
well, years to come
