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Student Postmortem: The University of Leeds Game Development Society's NinjaSticks Introduction The Game Development Society at the University of Leeds was created two years ago because of the lack of game course at the University. As part of the Union, the society acts as a forum for interested students. We support our members with their portfolios, we show off new engines, have talks, trips to IGDA meet-ups and fun socials. We thought that it was great to learn about games development, but without applying what we discuss then there wouldn't be much point. This brings us to our Community Game; NinjaSticks. Our community game enables us as a society to bring together our members and their talents. The society is run through a committee and sub-committee structure in conjunction with member participation. We structured the society according to the Union’s constitution which we have to adopt, laying out the rules and regulations for the committee members. The three key players are the Treasurer, Secretary and President; the latter has been my position for the last two years. The early stages of the society were concentrated on getting members and support from the industry, the latter of which was mainly financial. We had some difficulties finding sponsoring, but we received good general support from many companies. Only one company gave us financial support, with the donation of £352 from Rik Heywood’s Cipher Engine. Industry support came mainly through GameRepublic, whom have introduced us to the great guys at Creative North, Rockstar Leeds, Team 17, BlueFX and many more. The Microsoft Academic team has been one of our strongest supporters too, helping us develop most of our events. Through Microsoft, we hosted a launch party for Halo 2 featuring the Xbox LAN Party roadkit and as the main prize was a crystal Xbox! We also helped with MS’ Gen'05 event which was a great day, where Microsoft promoted all areas of technology. Since it was in Leeds, many universities made the trip to come and check it out.
The first year we ran, we had a total membership of 40 students, this year we have over 103. We can estimate that approximately 15 are really active members throughout these two years. Here’s a bit about the current demographic of our members:
The Community game NinjaSticks uses the Torque Game Engine. The best description of the game would be a cel-shaded stick figure beat-'em-up with a twist! It really is something to see! As our first project, the visual style was clear and yet gave us the freedom to expand in areas that the committee wanted to push. The way we structured the community game, was not specifically to produce a fully working game, but to get students and members involved in something that has the potential to do so but puts them in a game development environment in which they have to get used to the technical requirements, the dedication, the quality and research. To promote this we also held "Devathons," a concept which was taken from the Quake3Fortress team (now SplashDamage). Everyone who can brings their own computer to the president's house and works over the course of a weekend or three days on the game. This not only facilitated the development of the game but got everyone working together and sharing their knowledge, although this sometimes slipped into some good LAN games. To run the society, we have set it up as if we ran a virtual team; our website being the main focus point for the members. Using the Geeklog CMS system we provided our members with news, forums, a bug tracker, RSS feeds, picture gallery and file manager. Our members can also write in stories and contribute to nearly all aspects of the website. Yet to further benefit this setup, we ran SVN to update our Community Game and let everyone remain on the same page. This type of setup is a must for any virtual team/society involved in development as it allows members to access everything under one login and stay up to date with all the society’s actions. What Went Right 1. Leeds Being in Leeds has facilitated our presence as we have been supported by GameRepublic. We came across them during our sponsorship research stage and they have allowed us to attend their members meetings free of charge, something that’s really exceptional! Through these meetings we have been able to meet and network with some of the UK’s top game leaders, something that the committee couldn’t have dreamed of. Leeds is a fantastic place. Not only does the university feature over 86,000 students in total, there are also many game companies in the area, 19 in total. We have also been able to attend IGDA meetings in Manchester, where we got to know some great developers and got a chance to talk about our community game. Being so close to Bradford has also helped with university relations as we have held strong ties with their game development society. Here are some quick facts about our university:
2. University and Union Support As previously mentioned, the University is attended by a huge amount of students, which has been a really good thing for us. We have been able to create a society comprised of members and committee members of all different studies and degrees. Our first head of design was an aviation and management student, while one of our main level contributors was a physicist. With the committee being structured in sections, we are able to target the specific departments for support. Our main departmental support comes from the computing school; they helped us spread the word through lectures and announcements. The Union has also been a strong supporter, as they already hold a portfolio of societies they knew how to deal with us. We have a resource centre, which gives us access to financing, meeting rooms, media equipment and even a conference hall. Despite sharing these facilities with the other societies, which can be slightly difficult due to the demands, without these the meetings would have been difficult. The Union also provides societies with financial backing; all the money spent in the Union by students goes to the running of the Union and in part to supporting the sports clubs and societies. During our first year we received a grant of £500, which has allowed us to buy copies of Torque and promote our events. We have been allocated over £750 for travel costs to GDC: Europe and further Torque licenses. All the finances need to be precise and justified, which in turn helps the society to be run as a business under the umbrella of the Union. Our first year budget was of £965, our second year budget is now at £1080.
Two events are held every year for recruitment; Fresher’s Fair in October and Re-Fresher’s Fair in January. Nearly every year there are approximately 24,000 students visiting Fresher’s fair to sign up to clubs and societies. Microsoft helped us with our latest Fresher fair, as they provided us with a large Halo 2 Master Chief billboard, hard to miss for any students. A good level of organisation and promotion is needed for these events, but the experience is not too distant to holding a stand at trade shows, with the exception of the smaller budget. 3. Torque and GarageGames GarageGames and the Torque Game Engine have been a wonderful element of the society. The engine provided us with the ability to work on our Community game, but also provided us with a huge community of resources and power for such a cheap price. We obtained an educational price, and gave our members a further discount through the Union grants. Through the two years running we provided GarageGames with $2150 worth of business, which is over 15 Torque Licenses-not bad considering it was coming from a voluntary society and was mostly financed independently. The engine is very powerful too, and allowed us to quickly prototype GUIs, gameplay, research and levels. The pipelines were fairly easy once understood, and provided us with an easy way to make assets. The WorldEditor certainly helps students with little gaming experience get accustomed to working in a game editor and produce quality levels. The large community participating on the forums and the GarageGames website has been essential as a prime resource for our development of the community game.
As president, I spent time promoting the game through the .plan files and SnapShots which feature on the GarageGames website. Last year they brought in Davey Jackson to take over the Educational side of Torque, now with this direct link shouldn’t be any problems for new societies to get involved with Torque. 4. Doing something different and Unique Somehow we came at the right time and place - by this I mean that we managed to create the first university society which is aimed at developing games, which has the track record and support from the industry in the UK. We researched other societies, only to come up with 5 game related and two whom are centred on game development but are part of games courses. When attending IGDA meetings in Manchester or GameRepublic, we always got a somewhat surprised but highly welcoming smile from developers and CEOs as we explained our setup. The construct of the society allowed us to give our work and ethos validity in the eyes of developers and publishers that we met. What Went Wrong 1. Torque You might be surprised to see Torque here, but there some good reasons. We started our Community game project two years ago, and at that time the Torque Game Engine and support was very different than what it is now. Most of our members had little or no experience with game development, which is why they joined the society. While our project was somewhat ambitious, we found it hard to progress and teach the members on how to utilise Torque features due to the lack of documentation-a problem now resolved with their Torque developer Network Wiki, which acts as a documentation centre updated by all Torque users. We struggled largely with character integration and animations (see Motion Capturing) due to this lack of documentation. Furthermore, the engine is huge. Our programmers still don’t fully understand this engine. With a combination of lack of documentation and inexperienced students, this came to become quite a challenge. We faced some bugs which caused our pipeline to be broken at many stages. Selection and movement of objects in the WorldEditor was buggy which led to frustrated students during the level creation stages. A lot of meeting time was wasted looking at documentation or processes that required huge amounts of research and forum posts to obtain coherent results. As a response many of our members found it frustrating and didn’t want to work on the project because of this lack of information. Having said all this, the problems mentioned above have been addressed by GarageGames, which only comes to reinforce our previous view that these guys are very supportive and listen to critique. 2. Motion Capturing Making a beat’em up for the first time as our first project was probably a crazy idea, yet as any developer, we went ahead and tried it. We knew motion capturing was not going to be easy, and for us it not only came to accessing the hardware but also using the results. As we are students and aimed at gaining experience in all fields of game development, this wasn’t a problem for us. We got lucky, we found out our University’s biomechanics department held 8 Vicon Cameras. As for the Tae Kwon-Do moves, we met up with Ricky Lam, head of the Tae Kwon-Do Society who has worked on Batman Begins as a stuntman. Ricky provided us with over a hundred and twenty moves.
The process was very well planned, we worked on the moves over three days and obtained some really good setups. However, due to the location and antiquity of the cameras we had a serious amount of node losses which, as any animator will tell you, is a killer for Motion Capturing. After hours of tweaking in Qualisys Track Manager, we exported our data to .C3D format. Now because our University hadn’t upgraded Track Manger we only could export to .c3d, we were locked in data that was exported in an ancient data format for Motion Capture. We couldn’t load it up in 3DS Max nor any other program except Motion Builder. Despite having done that, due to our inexperience, we still haven’t been able to link the .C3D optical data to a character rig, as antiquity of this format makes the documentation for the process rather limited. Leaving us with over 120 brilliant moves with no rigs to power nor game use. 3. Students Our committee holds a love/hate relationship with students-ironic since students are what make the society. The committee acted as the most dedicated group of individuals out of the society. We created plans to allow members to show us their projects and ideas and allow the committee to work on developing them or pushing them towards the right direction. We also tried to hold workshops and socials, which seem to have failed mainly due to time and lack of attendance. Student lives are hectic and totally unpredictable, which does not facilitate the planning of events and activities for such a demanding hobby. While some students, including myself, were able to contribute and use the society to learn, many didn’t, which affected the committee morale towards organising and developing the society’s events. It is quite possible that because Leeds doesn’t have a specific game development course, the ‘right’ kinds of students haven’t been present. Yet having spoken to students on various game courses, most of their actual learning does not come from their learning during their classes but through their self-teaching of engines and programs, which would only validate the use and function of our society. Student participation has overshadowed a large part of our activities in the second year as the increase in membership has actually decreased the member participation, to the bewilderment of the committee. Conclusion As president and co-founder of the society, I’ve taken a long time to reflect on what we have achieved. There is no doubt that what we have done has been unique and immensely rewarding for everyone involved. The amount of events and achievements we’ve managed to pull through on top of our studies has been immense. The committee has gone through a tremendous growth; not only in our understanding of game development and techniques but also personally in terms of collaborating as a team and working together. We produced over two strong design documents, developed a unique and strong game concept, three LAN parties of which one for the launch of Halo 2, 2 Devathons, a talk with Ernest Adams, numerous workshops and presentations, attending GameRepublic and IGDA meetings, experienced motion capturing and beta testing for Team 17. While we haven’t been able to fully complete NinjaSticks, we have learned so much through the process, and with the recent changes with Torque we are thinking of bringing up the project again and completing it for the end of the year. All of the society's achievements are already sometimes more than what some game courses have to offer in three years for many students, so I’m extremely proud to have worked with a committee that help create this society. Most of the committee members are actively looking for positions in the gaming industry, now set with a good basis of experience and contacts they will without a doubt find a spot for themselves, but as my terms as president end in march, I can only look back with a great sense of pride and achievement at what has been done through our society. Game Development Society – http://www.gdsleeds.com _____________________________________________________ |
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Student Postmortem: The University of Leeds Game Development Society's NinjaSticks
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