Football and chess wouldn’t exactly strike anyone as the most obvious sporting marriage. So no wonder Hugh McAtamney was interested to see why – having asked his third year DIT computer science students to create a paper prototype of a games design for the XNA Ireland Games Programming Competition – one group had created a chess table populated by footballs. Considering the theme he was asking his students to stick to for the competition – taking place at the national Games Fleadh in March – was Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary he felt it was best to see what they were up to.

DIT gaming students (with lecturer Bryan Duggan, far right, back row) who won the XNA Ireland Games Programming Competition in 2009.

“It looked like some sort of chess-soccer to begin with, I couldn’t really see the point, but the team ended up calling the project PacBall. It’s a team of PacMan and while you played football each player can only move in a certain way, it’s a really great idea, probably the best project this year,” says McAtamney who lectures the third year optional module of Games Logic and Design in the Computer Science BSc.

McAtamney, along with Bryan Duggan, oversees the gaming streams within third and fourth year of DIT’s Computer Science degree, with Duggan’s fourth year stream following up McAtamney’s study of logic and design by examining games programming. The pair are sitting in a room designed specifically for the course, and alongside them some of the students involved are eulogising about the joys of studying how to create games from the bottom up.

Two of the students present – Brendan Marsh and Zach Davidson, both in the latter stages of the third year of their degree – were part of the team that won last year’s Games Programming Competition in Tipperary with a game called ‘Asteroids’ and both have found the process of creating games, even the laborious back end work, to be among their favourite elements of the Computer Science degree.

“If we weren’t doing all the gaming projects we’re doing in this stream we would have learned very little,” says Davidson, “it really motivates you; a lot of subjects obviously are project-based but you’re doing projects and they always feel like a college project if you get me. When you’re working on a game it’s very hard to make a game seem like learning so when you’re making a game you’re going to see it as actually making something. It’s all very self driven within the games streams though, you’ll want to get something made, want to get something implemented, it’s learning stuff yourself rather than being explicitly taught it and games is certainly the best for that”

"It gives them something fun to do for four years for one thing," says Bryan Duggan

He continues, “Like with the XNA win, the reception there was really good, it was a good achievement and to see people actually playing the game was a big thing.”

At the minute Marsh is wading through some basic levels of a platform game that he, Davidson and fellow student Conor Dunne, who also pops in, are developing for a current project. Various characters – including one that looks very like a Ribena grape – are joined on screen by explosions and effects as the gameplay slowly takes shape.

Says Marsh, “It’s about getting the characters working properly so that they can interact with each other and then design out some levels. We’ve been doing this for three months, I’ve been doing the engine and other people are doing level design, Conor is doing animation, eventually you get it all together. From what I have here, this is playable, it represents a game and that can be done in a fairly short amount of time. There’s software out there that allows you to create this relatively easily but you need a team together. Not everybody has the same artistic talent for instance for getting together characters, some people can code better than others and so on. One thing we’ve learned is that it’s usually a good idea to not think about the technical stuff until you start developing, you have to set your goals high and filter down from there.”

Talking about how his own attitude to gaming has changed since he began interacting with the basic of design, Marsh said he has discarded his “expensive games only” policy and now finds more to admire in indie games. Dunne agrees, saying that “seeing other people use really good ideas to make something great out of simple graphics and for guys like us in here we can see that you can do that”.

Both Duggan and McAtamney believe that students who get through the gaming stream will benefit from the work ethic involved with all projects geared towards national or international competitions. Indeed, the platform game that Marsh, Dunne and Davidson are working on is going up for consideration in this year’s Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup prize in Poland. Both however, would be wary of preaching to students that there are jobs available within the gaming industry.

“It’s not a huge industry here,” says Duggan, “people generally go onto Microsoft and IBM after (the BSc) but the vision we have here is to give them transferable skills which they can bring into any are of the computer industry when they graduate. It gives them something fun to do for four years for one thing. The industry is on the up though in fairness, with around a 400% increase over the past five years in the amount of games-related jobs in Ireland. People like Gala are there taking on developers, people like Havok are creating jobs and guys are going out on their own with start ups.”

Davidson also notes that “There are more opportunities in middleware and loads of casual games – if you want to work on big titles you’re not staying in Ireland and when I say big I mean pretty much anything that’s going to be released on a major console. It’s a lot easier nowadays because there are a lot of tools available to developers like Steam, the App Store, Facebook, and all these things provide platforms. If you go back ten years the difference is a lot more noticeable.

“Now there are so many platforms to release on and so many ways to get your game out there to sort of make people notice you. There’s a lot of little start ups are starting at Trinity and we saw in Tipperary last year. You can make middleware but then you’re not making games
McAtamney weighs in saying “They learn a lot of cross transferable skills, but it would be hard to go straight in to a games company as the they’re software engineers once they’re graduated, that’ s one of the reasons we set up the Masters.”

Peter Molyneux, who will help launch the new games MSc at DIT next Thursday.

The Masters he’s referring to is the MSc in Digital Games which is attracting the attention of many of the third and fourth years studying gaming. It’s being launched officially at a talk by games guru Peter Molyneux next Thursday which is in association with the Jameson International Film Festival. Molyneux will be discussing RPG game development within the Irish gaming industry which is apt considering if there is a future for it here then graduates of the MSc may well have a large hand to play in any possible success stories.

The full-time programme will provide modules in ludology, game design, programming, animation, project management and the business of games.

There’s a natural progression from the third and fourth year gaming studies towards the MSc claims McAtamney “We really we try and focus on what makes a good game, testing games and breaking it down to game logic, building everything from the bottom up, that’s third and then in fourth year Bryan will bring in a lot of the maths and C++. From there you could see some people using the skills in other areas but I think many will go for the MSc as it’s hard to get rid of the itch once you start enjoying working with games.”