Fun With Games

Faced with the choice of taking Immersive Environments and Games Design paired with Computer Animation - or Geographic Information Systems and Data Mining I tried, I really did, to pick the sensible options where I'd actually learn useful, re-usable skills for my future employability.

Alas, I failed, and I'm now spending half of my teaching hours playing with various games engines and 3D models. I'm not entirely sure what, if anything, I'm learning - but it's fabulous fun and mostly coursework based (which I thought was great, until I realised how much more work I've got left for my Final Year Project).

Here's some samples of the fun:

1. An Unreal level

No, not one of the exciting kind of Unreal, like Unreal Tournament - but just the physics and graphics engine. Oh well, I still made a fun little 'puzzler' out of it - and managed to submit the coursework with 13 minutes to spare. Let me know if you want a copy of the map (the runtime's free to download) - and here's some screenshots for now.


<sub>It has flames and noises and smoke and everything in game ^^


This holds a big glass ball, eventually - looks quite cool empty though I think.


Stained Glass; technically impressive, visually quite nice too.


The great outdoors.



Holes in the walls o.O


Another arty angle.</sub>

Also, if anyone cares, there's a step-by-step guide to how I made the level, that I submitted as part of my coursework, available here (yes I know one of the links there is dead, you'll work it out though, you're clever people).

2. Pacman 3D

The end of today's lab class simply stated 'Create a PacMan-like game'. I always wondered what PacMan would be like if he was actually a sphere, rather than a circle, and obeyed the laws of physics, bouncing off and around things. Now I have my answer; rubbish.


_{Yes, the graphics are rubbish - but I did knock the whole thing together in 30 minutes.}

3. Pumpkin

I was quite bemused when we were asked to create a small game whereby a pumpkin (complete with flickering candle innards) bounced around, opened a door and jumped off the end of the world. I had endless fun setting up the pumpkin to be smashed miles into the air by the force of the opening door though: