Student teams get serious about creating video games

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Student teams get serious about creating video games

Thursday, May 25, 2000

By RUTH SCHUBERT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

To make his course on software system design more difficult for computer science majors, University of Washington professor John Zahorjan invited other students into the class -- high school students.

The college senior-level course, more commonly known as "the games course," had become too easy.

"The first year we did it, I didn't think anyone was going to be able to build a game," Zahorjan said last week.

But in the following couple of years, the class had lost what Zahorjan called "the can-it-be-done aspect."

So this quarter, for the first time, students from Cleveland, Franklin, Garfield and Marshall Alternative high schools in Seattle are working with UW students to create a video game from scratch.

Bringing high school students on board has proved to be a sometimes rewarding, sometimes frustrating experience. Two students from Marshall have outdone themselves. But other high school students have simply disappeared. Still others have been creating cool computer models of figures that, unfortunately, aren't at all what the team needs in order to finish the video game by Wednesday.

"It is worse than we had hoped, but better than we had feared," Zahorjan said.

The class is broken into four groups, with the high school students designated as the art team and the UW students assigned to programming. Each team's creation is limited only by imagination and time. One team is creating a medieval role-playing game, another a capture-the-flag scenario.

Although the goal is to create a video game, the course was actually designed with a very different motive in mind. People in the software industry had started to complain that computer science graduates from places like the UW didn't know how to work with other people.

At the outset of the course, students get only commercial software. They have to figure out the rest themselves, including what schedule to work, what computer tools to use and how to manage the work among themselves.

"It's not like a normal course at all," Zahorjan said. "They basically get to decide everything."

The Marshall team, the smoothest running of the quarter, decided to take a computerized dive. The team describes the underwater game it created like this:

"The year is 2040. Humans have used up all natural resources on land, and have polluted their soil so they can no longer grow food. . . . While the rich and elite move to other planets and moons, the rest must fight for what is left on earth. Instead of going up, they must go down."

Part of the reason the Marshall team has worked so well is proximity. The Ravenna school is close enough that students can easily get to the UW computer lab once a week.

Last week, Marshall students Peter Samsel, 14, and Richard Barley, 18, were creating submarines and torpedoes for the game.

"It's been an interesting experience," Barley said. "We should have something presentable in a couple of weeks."

In contrast to Barley's low-key assessment of his work, the UW students on the team rave about their Marshall counterparts.

"We probably have the best art team here," said Max Noy, a UW junior. "It's been really great, actually."

Even Zahorjan has been impressed by what the Marshall students have accomplished.

"I have no explanation for how they've done what they've been doing," he said. "You'd think they'd been doing it for years."

Live demos are scheduled for Wednesday -- ready or not. And although some students joke about sleeping under the tables in the computer lab, even the furthest behind expect to have something.

"When you set them loose to do what they want to do," Zahorjan said, "they do more than you'd expect."

P-I reporter Ruth Schubert can be reached at 206-448-8130 or ruthschubert@seattle-pi.com