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5:47pm on Thursday, 27th April, 2023:
Anecdote
It was project demonstration day today, when all out final-year students demonstrate their work to representatives from industry, academics and each other.
Essex University is unusual when it comes to games, because we don't do group capstone projects. All the work is the student's own. They don't have many games in their portfolio, but given that industry recruiters only ever look at one or at most two games from a portfolio, this isn't as negative as it sounds. The fact that they can claim all the work, so there's no need to tease out what exactly an individual did in a group project, more than balances it out.
I'm often quite cynical about the lack of enthusiasm shown by our students, but when it comes to project demonstration day I'm reminded that just because I don't see it, that doesn't mean it's not there. Some of the projects were absolutely outstanding. Some were barely competent, of course, but I was impressed many more times than I was disappointed.
Also, some had a tremendous amount of work behind that that wasn't obvious from what was on display. People had written their own game engines from scratch — no use of libraries. People had written their own games from scratch — not in Unity or Unreal, but in C++ or Java or even Python. People had used game engines and written their own AI controllers for opponents. Some games were good enough and polished enough that they're on the app store. Others are going to lead to PhDs in games for health (yes, "others" — there was more than one).
It's frustrating when a game doesn't look sophisticated but when you scratch the surface you find it's amazing underneath. It's also frustrating when a game looks to be using assets straight out of the asset store but they've been hand-made by the student and are so good they look professional (especially as we don't teach game art). It's annoying when a game looks good but has no substance to it, though, and even worse when it looks bad and is vacuous. We did have some of those.
I was particularly impressed by a student who had made a mobile phone game (basically a JRPG) and built a tool to help him make it when other students had spent their whole time just making the tool; what to him was merely something to speed up development was to them the entire project.
One of the project topics, which was taken up by a number of students, was "recreate an old arcade game without using a game engine". A number of them chose Mario Bros, and they were all superb. One of them implemented all 32 levels and had made a tool so he could create his own, too. One of them implemented Galaxian so well I was half-expecting to have to put 10p into a coin slot — even the sound was spot on. There were recreations of Street Fighter and Pole Position that were more or less the same as the originals. These were, in general, implemented by students on the general Computer Science degree, rather than the Computer Games degree.
Overall, I came away pleased and optimistic. Whether any of these students will get jobs in the games industry remains to be seen, but there are enough of them with the skills and imagination to do so that I hope some break through.
Unfortunately, tomorrow is the deadline for the report that goes with the projects, meaning I have half a dozen of them to read within about a week.
The lot of a lecturer is that you have so much work to do that you never get any work done.
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Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).