Bedfordshire win second place!

A team from the University of Bedfordshire won runners up for Mobile at Brains Eden in Cambridge last weekend. 5 Students from different courses and different years in the Computer science department took part in the 48 hour hackathon.

Image from @andra_ivanescu on twitter.

The event was one of the biggest hackathons I’ve been to, there was teams from all over the world there. Spain, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and even Canada. The team consisted of Sean McGee (me), Bogdan Predescu, Liam Griffiths, Robert McGreal and Mathew Kaye.

The theme this year was “Unequal” and the game we designed was a medieval themed tilt game where you had to attack a castle while keeping the island even as all enemies would slide off.

We all won tablets for coming runners up and the first prize was a team from the Netherlands who again won tablets. The game will hopefully be published on android, iOS and windows market place soon. We are happy where we placed and considering the time taken we made a very polished and complete game. The competition was extremely good, almost every game we tried was unique and generally visually stunning.

Link to the game

http://it-ca.net/CastleTilt/Webplayer.html

I think the game turned out very well, considering the hackathon was 48 hours & only that time for those who brought there own laptops! We was stuck in a very hot room, 1 monitor and on macintoshes prone to over heating and made life difficult for us. We had an amazing outcome and are really happy with second place! A team from the Netherlands came first, we played there game during the gallery showcase and was great fun!

UPDATE: I also create a similar blog post which got featured on Microsoft.com! For those who wanted more information on it.

University of Bedfordshire GameJam 2014!

Last weekend (#dates) I attended a gamejam at the university. For those of you who don’t know what a gamejam is, it’s basically where a bunch of nerds get together and create games/apps. If that wasn't geeky enough, it’s a 48 hour constant hackathon. I've attended similar events at the university, but this one had a rather strange theme which was…

"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”

This is a broad subject for a theme so it took quite a bit of planning to get the right theme and style game. My group members were:

Artists – Sean McGee, Robert McGreal and Chris Hadjimbeis

Programmers/Unity Developers – Kyle Field, Grant Wade, Tareq Ahmed and Daniel Nelson

Planning the game

We decided to create a horror game. In the 48 hours given we achieved a rather unique and scary game. We also had access to an Oculus Rift.

                                

Oculus Rift Device

This is really fun device which allows users to look around a scene using their heads. So they just move to look; we thought this would be perfect with a horror game. We decided to create a game similar to that of “Alone” which is an existing Oculus Rift game, but we tried to implement quite a few new features. I’ll update this blog when I get my hands on the project files to show you how it looked. The project we called "Synced" might be available soon on a few devices to play for yourself, so I'll let you know when I get more news.

Events like this will always be good to go to. Not only is it a personality test as you need to work in groups in harsh situations with a very fast deadline, but you get to test your own body without sleep.  Most people can’t handle it and end up sleeping under desks for a few hours. This time I actually stayed with local friends for the weekend but I still managed to get a lot done. I personally think no matter how good you are at time management, there are always things that creep up on you at the last minute. A gamejam is a nice way to test how you do under pressure and how much work is physically possible in the time given.