IT-Camp 2009 at Klagenfurt University

Ever tried mixing 9 high school students, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and one week of mentorship together? The result is nondeterministic, but experience showed that the projects turn out to be really awesome and fun to build.

After last year’s IT-Camp the University of Klagenfurt decided to continue the project where 15-17 year old teenagers are brought to Klagenfurt to experience university life firsthand. Like last year I was instructing a course about computer game development using Microsoft XNA Game Studio together with Christoph Kofler.

The first day started with a short introduction to computer games in terms of genres, target audience and distinctions. Turns out most of our students were avid players, so we couldn’t keep them away from our Guitar Hero setup for long. After Christoph and I got our asses kicked at Guitar Hero we then went on to analyze what made games great or not and how to judge games in different genres.

On Tuesday Mathias came in to deliver a little lecture about game design (thank again!) before we gave them a little tutorial on XNA and the most important things in 2D space like collision detection and state management. After that, they started development of their own games.

Game projects where pretty diverse this year since we explicitly allowed them to experiment with their own ideas rather than everyone doing the same 2D space shooter. This led to these really awesome projects:

Fisch-Game:

The little fish Kiku has to save the mermaid. He has to avoid the sharks for more than 40 seconds to finish the game. Complete with Arielle the mermaid sounds.

Adventure

A

This Zelda-like adventure features a scrolling map and animated characters. A per pixel collision detection was also implemented. Goal is to solve one simple quest, but the whole thing could easily be extended to something much bigger.

Mario-Clone

A Supermario clone that features basic collision detection and shooting of a projectile. The projectile will only hit one enemy and different enemies do more or less damage. Also it uses a small state machine to allow Mario to jump and fall.

Maxrace

A fairly simple but funny game. Goal is to reach the princess by alternating the left and right arrow button on the keyboard. Time is recorded and entered into the highscore. Really cool about this game is it’s simplicity in state – only one variable is incremented by 1 every valid keystroke.

Asteroidsx

A Asteroid clone that features a physics engine. Asteroids get drawn into the planet in the middle by gravity, player has to avoid asteroids and "poke" them if they are too far away from the planet's gravity to keep them going. Very challenging math-wise and well implemented. Unfortunately features were cut because of delays on the physics part.

Presentation

This was the first chance I had to try out a more “amateurish” style of PowerPoint slides that led to me buying a graphic tablet. The presentation was quite successful I think, so we used the same one for the final presentation before media and parents:

Finally

I’d really like to thank the University of Klagenfurt and Mathias Lux for this opportunity and also say a little thanks to our students. The week was (as last year) a very rewarding and fun experience for me and I hope to continue this next year.

After 2 years of doing this with XNA game studio I’d also like to point out that XNA has proven itself to be a really perfect tool for starting game development. We get students with a quite diverse skill set and they all picked up the tool very easily and all managed to deliver something truly awesome, whether it was object-oriented or just a long procedural piece. The framework won’t stand in your way while still giving you some of the most important stuff for free.

Sourcecode

The Sources of the games will be hosted at the IT-Camp’s website and I’ll add a link to it as soon as we manage to upload it.

Ps: Thanks Georg Holzer for allowing me to use his photograph of our end presentation!