The Imagine Cup

Second in the list of key events is the Imagine Cup, which is a Microsoft run event (sense a theme?), in which IT students from across the globe compete in several categories. My obvious choice was Games Development and our focus was the millennium goals.

Initially I did not plan to enter the imagine cup as it would take up a lot of my spare time, which between playing American Football for roughly 15 hours a week, matching that with lectures, and then doing university work outside of lectures, was severely lacking. The push that I needed came in a Ludology lecture, in which we were set tutorial work of getting a partner and producing a rough prototype of a game for the competition. The idea was that we would continue on, which we did, and went on to recruit two other members, one more programmer and an artist. Our entry for round one was functioning well and provided a pretty good representation of what our game could one day be. That was until we broke it, conducting a last minute repair job we managed to get the game into a state which would eventually boost us through into the second round.

And this is where the fun began, the culmination of some great team work and a really good effort on each members part pushed us to the point where we were able to submit what we feel is a pretty awesome game. We are awaiting the results of round 2, which is the semi-finals, and are definitely hopeful for a trip to Cairo for the world finals!

If you are wondering about entering this competition in the future, I would definitely recommend it as not only did I learn a lot about both programming and game design concepts, my ability to work as part of a team improved.

If you are interested in seeing our entry, here is a short video showing some of the key mechanics.



(Thanks AJ :P).

Stephen