seriousgames.ie

Congratulations to team Cross Frogger who this week competed against sixteen teams from institutes across Ireland to take the coveted XNA Game Studio Ireland Challenge College Cup (top prize overall) in the XNA Ireland Challenge. The contest invites students to recreate a classic arcade game using Microsoft’s XNA technology. This year’s theme was the classic Konami arcade game Frogger which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. The team of BSc in Computer Science students developed three new levels that a player can interact with using Microsoft’s Kinect full-body motion capture system. The international judges from the games industry were also impressed with the team’s novel use of procedural audio that synchronises with gameplay. The team of Liangchuan Gu (Iric), Zhensheng Tan (Simon), Xini Jia (Luke) and Wei Yuan (Lily) from DT228/3 also were awarded a special prize of Best Original Innovation in Gaming at the contest. The team who took time out of their work placement’s to develop the game and compete in the competition, learned how to program XNA as part of the Game Design and Ludology module taught by School of Computing lecturer Hugh McAtamney.
Team mentor Dr Bryan Duggan says: “Games programming presents students with the opportunity to master difficult subjects such as object orientated programming and maths by doing something creative and fun. Additionally the team have developed an amazing portfolio piece that will impress any potential employer.”

Other winners at Games Fleadh 2011 were team FrogSplat (DT228/2 students Alan Egan, Jimmy Bryce and Emmanuelle Adenola) who won the Best in Animation prize. These students were particularly notable as they taught themselves XNA and the C# programming language in order to compete in the competition. A third DIT team, Delicious Frogs Legs – Yitong Hu (Max) and Ge Feng (Steve) from DT228/2 were awarded Best in Original Gameplay for their novel game Anti-Frogger, while DT228/1 students Stephen Crowther, Bo Sheng and Hao Guan competed in the Robocode robot programming competition.