"Parents are here with their kids who want to be game programmers," computer science student Davy Sulock said. "I never could have done that at that age."
The students had a lot at stake: Grades. Practical experience in an industry many want to join. A shot at seeing middle and high school students use their games in class -- but only if the games work like they're supposed to.
"There's definitely pressure," computer science student Tyler Arehart said.
Exhausted and satisfied, they released their games to a standing-room-only crowd of students, family, faculty, gaming fans and local game industry veterans.
Student programmer Daniel McKinnon called the 72 hours before April 24 "pretty crazy."
"I think we exceeded what we thought we could do," he said. "Or maybe I'm happy because I haven't slept."
The 10 students who built "Blackbeard's Escape" and the nine behind "Spectral Assault" looked frayed around the edges the night of the showcase. They learned this semester that developing a game requires time they weren't going to get.
"[Building] a game is tough in one semester," Buie said, adding that Xbox's blockbuster, "Halo," took six years.
"Blackbeard's Escape" was the work of designers Matt Bell and George Lamontagne and programmers Arehart, Stewart Atchley, Mackenzie Corcoran, Petar Drankarov, Matt McCaskill, Reid Overton, Mike Winters, and Dao Xiong. They called their venture Poseidon Studios.
Shipwreck, ho
The game details efforts to salvage the Queen Anne's Revenge, thought to be the flagship of the famous pirate Blackbeard. Players work as divers and scientists uncovering artifacts. Each time a player recovers a cannon, barrel or door, he or she rockets back to the early 1700s and defends the Queen Anne's Revenge against another ship trying to steal the precious booty.
"It took an entire month to figure out what we wanted to do," Overton said.
Lamontagne, Bell, Winters and Arehart visited state marine archaeologists -- who have been working on the Queen Anne's Revenge wreckage in Beaufort and at a lab in Greenville -- to learn how Blackbeard lived and looted.
They learned that the salvage team has been working on the wreckage for 12 years. How could they squeeze all that work and history into a 20-minute game?
They quickly learned to edit their grand idea. McKinnon, who worked on "Spectral Assault," said the conversations usually went like this. Designer: "Wouldn't it be great if we could ... ?" Programmer: "No."
Designing a game from scratch would have taken years; even professionals don't do it that way. Part of the team's assignment was to use a game engine called Unreal Tournament 3, a product of Epic Games, based in Cary, to create their own games.
But Unreal doesn't have a manual or a cheat sheet. It took a month for the NCSU students to learn Unreal's tricks, secrets and foibles, then the rest of the time to learn to pump up, undo, and jerry-rig them to suit their games. By the end, they were putting in 40-hour weeks.
"Oh yeah, when you weren't working on it, you felt dirty," Lamontagne said.
Both games had glitches and blank spots during the first playable session on March 30. The running joke was "no ladders," because no one had figured out how to get characters up and down ladders and staircases.
Buie, testing "Blackbeard's Escape," was trying to guide his diver from the water to the boat by scaling a ladder when everyone shouted, "Aaah! Not the ladder!"
They could have saved time by skimping on how the game played, by axing the ladders, for example, or how it looked, such as losing fancy water effects.
"Making it look good is probably harder, but both matter," Winters said. "If it looks bad, they won't want to play it. But if it looks good and plays bad, it'll take players too much time to figure out."
When building the game, you have "the salad days of process," Buie said. "The dogs days are the implementation -- what works, what doesn't," Buie said. "With technology, time is the enemy. Something always goes wrong."
Shock to the senses
The team behind "Spectral Assault"-- dubbed PiRadical, they are designers Scott Bailey, David Drews and Tyler Thompson and programmers Ryan Burger, David Campbell, Clayton Hamrick, Justus Robertson, Sulock and McKinnon -- had the same concerns about time. They also had to worry about whether their game seemed too violent to be educational.
"Spectral Assault" is a futuristic pirate game. Playing as Ray, the lowly ship mechanic, gamers use lasers to solve puzzles that teach them about light spectrum, reflection, refraction and other properties of physics. To advance, Ray has to aim his laser at the right color in the spectrum to shoot at and cancel out colored invaders on his ship.
Originally, Ray's laser looked like a combination drill and semiautomatic weapon. But Buie worried that the laser would make the physics learning game too much like a "shooter" game.
"I had to encourage them away from that direction," Buie said. "Sometimes that's hard."
These students, ages 21-28, grew up playing games with that kind of flash and impact. The game engine didn't help. Unreal is a "first-person shooter" in which gamers shoot obstacles and kill foes to win.
Testing "Spectral Assault" during the first playable session, Young properly shot his laser, using the correct color on the spectrum, to cut down an enemy. The game cheered him on, calling out, "First blood!" That audio is built into Unreal. PiRadical had to undo or tone down those things without sucking all of the fun out.
"Educational games get a bad rap for being dull, but they can be exciting, especially if they're violent," Hamrick said at the showcase. "Unfortunately, most players like violence."
Cracking the industry
Some of the school's administration raised eyebrows when Young first pitched the idea to team computer science and industrial design students to create video games. Both classes are 400-level, meaning the most advanced for undergraduates.
Was it too much pop culture for a university? Maybe, but Young said it was still easy to make his case.
"The pragmatic side is gaming is an $11 billion industry that hires a lot of people," Young said. "On the curriculum side, computer games are some of the biggest, most sophisticated software artifacts ever made. [Building them] is a great way to get students to use what they've learned in four years."
Thirty game companies operate in the Triangle, employing 1,200 people. Epic Games and Spark Plug Games sponsored the April 24 showcase. Atomic Games hosts Buie's class in its design studio each spring. Randy Brown, chief technology officer at Virtual Heroes, has given guest lectures.
John Austin, senior vice president at Emergent Game Technologies; John Farnsworth, studio director at Atomic; and Young also serve together on the board of the Triangle Game Initiative, the trade association for the local interactive entertainment industry.
"What they're doing at State totally aligns with what we're trying to do at Atomic," Farnsworth said.
Dan Amerson, a former student of Young's and technical director at Emergent, said the days of hiring a hot coder based on a great demo are over. "Now you really need a degree and knowledge of things not in the curriculum," Amerson said
Young is confident that N.C. State can formalize existing relationships by attracting a gaming company to set up shop on Centennial Campus. The availability of jobs is a great recruiting tool for students. The last time Emergent surveyed its staff, one-third came from N.C. State and a third came from UNC-Chapel Hill.
That pipeline continues to flow, in large part because of the evolution of Young and Buie's classes. Lamontagne is interning at Red Storm. Bell works at Matreya Studios as a lead concept artist.
Reaching a crescendo
By 7:30 p.m. April 24, a standing-room-only crowd filled a lecture hall in EB2 and listened as the two teams, sharply dressed in matching black polos (Poseidon Studios) or white shirts and ties (PiRadical Studios), described their games. The crowd didn't know that the two teams had spent most of the previous 72 hours trying to break the darn things.
"Usually you'd do alpha testing and beta testing, maybe with the public," Overton said. "We had a week to do it all ourselves. If we had six months or more we could put out a stellar game that we'd be willing to release to the public."
They were looking for bugs. They found them. They discovered late on April 23 that a refraction puzzle on "Spectral Assault" was impossible to solve. The player could push a lever to aim the beam of light into a box, but a player who overshot had no way to try again.
"It's this endless cycle of writing code, breaking it and fixing it," Peterson said.
"After like 12 hours in the same room looking at the same code, I wanted to slam my face on the desk."
Round and round it went until ... well, neither group felt their games were perfect.
"The game was due at 10 a.m. Bailey said. "We handed it in at 10 a.m."
Still, they left happy and satisfied. Later that night Thompson had taken a knee beside one young gamer who had become frustrated with the first part of "Spectral Assault." Thompson gave the kid a cheat code to push him along.
"It was cool seeing little kids totally engulfed," he said.
