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.
