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Programmers battle in Texas A&M game jam [The Eagle, Bryan, Texas](Eagle (Bryan, TX) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 10--Teams of students spent the weekend building video games as part of an event hosted by Texas A&M's Department of Visualization. The university's first game jam started Friday and ended Sunday after 15 teams from Texas A&M and Kansas State University spent 45 hours programming and developing their entries. André Thomas, a lecturer of game design, game development and digital environments at Texas A&M, said he decided to bring a game jam to A&M after attending a conference and hearing a professor from Amsterdam give a talk on how he organized a game jam. "I had always heard of game jams but had never participated, and he was doing a global game jam every spring," Thomas said. "And I thought 'Wow, that would be really cool to be a part of that for A&M.'" Thomas was the head of graphics at Electronic Arts, responsible for graphics of games such as Madden NFL and NCAA Football, before coming to A&M in January. He and Sherman Finch, an assistant professor at A&M, founded the Department of Visualization's Learning Interactive Visualization Experience (LIVE) lab to foster new ideas through collaboration with the video game industry. While at the conference, Thomas said, some people from Kansas State decided to participate in the competition as well. The game jam winner for best overall game was "Team No Name," consisting of Texas A&M freshman and sophomore computer science majors Jonathan Burk and Randall Dolifka, graduate student Kumar Sridharamurthy and computer science major Joy Hauser, a freshman from Kansas State. The team won for its game, Keep Swimming, which requires players to operate a fish underwater while avoiding various obstacles and collecting points. "I read that at most game jams, people come up with crazy, awesome ideas but they don't have time to implement it," Sridharamurthy said. "So we picked the simplest game we could do in 45 hours." Besides developing the game, the team members said the most difficult part of the competition was deciding on what their game should be about. "We had a bunch of different ideas," Burk said. "What ended up happening was because we didn't agree on any of these ideas, we ended up splicing together different themes." Each member of the team received a license from Unity, a gaming software company. The licenses, valued at $1,500 each, allow them access to software to develop and program games. Thomas said the competition was a success and he's planning to organize more. He said the Department of Visualization could eventually host the world's biggest game jam. ___ (c)2014 The Eagle (Bryan, Texas) Visit The Eagle (Bryan, Texas) at www.theeagle.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |