Duncan Day-Myron
“How are we going to do 3D graphics?”
Asking questions was the way things got started for everyone participating in the second annual Great Canadian Appathon. The event brought students together at universities across the country to compete to create a mobile game from the ground up in only 48 hours. With over $50,000 in prizes on the line, there was a lot at stake.
The competition, sponsored by XMG Studio Inc and the National Post, is the second this year, with the first taking place from March 11 to 13. While the first competition featured hubs at seven universities in Canada, the second had 20 schools competing, including the University of Guelph.
The competition was brought to Guelph with the help of Dr. Greg Klotz, program counsellor for the School of Computer Science.
“The students are creative, and this contest gives them the opportunity to build a game, with a chance to win great prizes,” said Klotz. “It also lets them apply the skills they learned in class, meet game developers, and find out what it might be like to work in the games industry.”
And what did Klotz hope the students to have accomplished by the end of the competition?
“I’d like to see a working prototype that the teams enjoyed developing,” said Klotz.
In the basement of the Reynolds Building, three teams worked feverishly at their laptops. It’s a small group of just eight students, and it’s easy to hear them brainstorming. From each corner of the room, negotiations took place about animation, friction, sprites, and all the other intricacies of game design. There is definitely some knowledge about what it takes to make a game fun.
“In terms of coding, there’s people in this country who can blow us out of the water,” said Sacha Bagasan of Team Security Camera, working on a 21-style basketball game. “What it’s going to come down to is good design and something that people are actually going to want to play.”
There was some debate about exactly which sports should be tackled. Benjin Yap and Omar Himada of Team III mentioned golf, darts and racing before settling on boxing. While Himada has experience developing games for Cocoa and the iPhone, their team is also a little unique.
“We just kind of hopped into this,” he said. “We only just met.”
While they may not have the advantage of forethought, they’re not hindered by it. Yap had made headway on the coding and Himada had some of the artwork well underway within only a few hours of the competition beginning.
At the outset, however, artwork did seem to be more of a concern for another team.
“One of the biggest [challenges] is graphics,” said Kenzie Rudolph-Wilson of Mangoat. “We’re all programmers, so not really great at drawing.”
He hoped by the end of the first night to have character and menu design complete, putting most of his attention on graphics from the beginning.
Say what you will about genre and gameplay, the core of any game is the graphics. Regardless of the platform, eras of gaming are defined by their visuals, and when a new generation rolls out, it’s innovation in graphics that tends to lead the way. But what do you do about artwork when you’re not an artist? Some of the teams have had to get creative in other ways.
Team Security Camera, made up of one third year and two fourth year students, have plenty of coding experience under their belts, but coding and drawing are two very different things.
“None of us are artists,” said Bagasan. And they’ve come up with an interesting way to deal with that: they’re not drawing anything.
“I’m actually the main character in the game,” said teammate Charles Wong. “We were gonna download some sprites, but [Sacha] came up with the idea. ‘Why don’t we just use you?’”
With footage of Wong shooting hoops, they pulled stills of him dribbling and making all the necessary shots. From that they can make animated 2-D sprites and, combined with a photograph of the net and court, they’ve got a fully animated game without a minute of drawing.
It’s a creative solution to a problem which could potentially upend a team’s chances. With only 48 hours to work in, time spent learning something new or simply unfamiliar is time eaten up. Reducing the graphics to photo cut-outs means no special artistic skills are required to make them.
“It’s a collective thing,” said Bagasan. “We don’t have any one graphics guy.”
Rudolph-Wilson, however, as the team’s designated graphic artist, is quick to point out that he does consider himself “half artist.” Mangoat are also keeping their graphics time-saving.
Rudolph-Wilson is taking inspiration from the world of Flash games, where simple pixel graphics reminiscent of 16-bit SNES and Sega Genesis games have made a strong and popular comeback.
“We like the pixel art, and it is way easier,” said fellow Mangoat member Trevor Baron. He’s referring to the use of tiles, many different individual graphic files he can repeat and reuse to create their arcade-style football game’s backgrounds, platforms and obstacles.
“By using tiles, it means that we can make any shape of level that we want,” said Rudolph-Wilson. “If I was making [graphics] level by level, I might be able to make more complex patterns but it would take me a lot longer. This way, I’m done and they can build the level however they want.”
Team III may have a ringer, however, in Omar Himada. The hand-drawn bobbing and weaving characters in their boxing app give away his experience.
“It wasn’t anything academic or professional, but growing up I was drawing a lot, and ended up messing around with Photoshop and Flash,” he said. Despite his talent, the creative process for Team III wasn’t without its hurdles.
“All my ideas were kind of flushed down the toilet when I realized the theme had to be sports,” Himada continued, likely recalling the many ideas he and teammate Benjin Yap discussed before settling on boxing. But with one fewer teammate than the competition, perhaps they need the leg up.
A strong concept is also important to the success of any game, but with only 48 hours to create a game, coming up with a concept and being able to carry it through without having to make any concessions might have seemed difficult. But all three teams managed to create a product that, in most ways, fulfilled the vision they’d initially started out with.
Wong remembers how easy it was for them to come up with an idea for their game.
“We had the idea right from the get go,” he said. “When the sports theme came up I said we’ve got to do basketball.”
Wong and his teammates worked to recreate a typical game of 21, with buttons on either side of the phone showing the different options for dribbling and shooting. Although they had a complete interface and framework with working animations in place, there were a few things they had to do without.
“Something a bit more flashy when you scored or lost the ball,” said Trevor Thompson, when asked what he would like to have been able to include. The team also seemed to regret having to cut sound from their application, due to the time constraints.
Their final product, however, wasn’t too far off from what they’d hoped to make.
“Some things got removed, but the basic gameplay is pretty much what we were aiming for,” continued Thompson.
Mangoat had a similar experience, both in creating and executing their game.
“When the sports theme was announced, we just went with it,” said Nick Bruner. “We’d come up with the idea before we even heard it was sports.”
Having had a head start on the idea likely helped Mangoat accomplish as much of what they’d hoped they would.
“We came pretty close,” said Rudolph-Wilson. “We got everything done that we wanted to, except deaths and switches. We didn’t need that much more time.”
That sentiment was echoed by Team III’s Omar Himada.
“We definitely didn’t finish everything that we’d hoped for, but at the same time it wasn’t that far away from what we expected,” he said. “It looks like I thought it would look like, that’s for sure.”
Even though the development stage of the competition has now ended, some of the participants are still optimistic about the future of their games.
“It’s certainly not finished,” said Himada.
“We’re probably going to work on it still,” said Mangoat’s Trevor Baron, sharing Himada’s optimism.
Hopefully their enthusiasm will be maintained until the next Great Canadian Appathon. Each team said they would enter it again next time. And after participating in it once, they’ll be a little more prepared.
For the time being however, the second Great Canadian Appathon is not quite complete. While the teams have all completed and submitted their games, now begins the judging process.
The team of judges is made up of former Toronto Maple Leaf Bill Derlago; XMG Studio’s founder and CEO Ray Sharma; XMG’s vice president of game development, Adam Telfer; Sheldon Sawchuk, general manager of National Post digital; and Santino Mariani, associate tax partner at KPMG. They will be judging the submissions based on four criteria: concept, graphics, entertainment value and stability.
The top 25 teams are set to be announced on Oct. 7, which will be narrowed to a top three on Oct. 21, with the winning game being announced on Nov. 2. The first prize team will be given $25,000, with $10,000 for second place, and 10 prizes of $1000 to runners-up in various categories, such as art, sound, multiplayer, and use of 3D.
Loading ...
