Frontier

The client is Matt Johnson (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).

Project proposals for 2016:

Earlier suggestions

Option 1:

Indy Community Framework

Independent or Indy game development has become an exciting and sometimes successful area. Many people are involved and some of the most successful new properties in the games industry are forged in this area. Projects are often developed by people meeting through forums and never meeting face to face. Often designers will seek programmers and artists to execute sections of their projects, and turn to sites such as Kickstarter to find external funding to cover these costs, or need to invest their own earnings and savings to do so.

The difficulty in this, is that when there are successes it can make it difficult for projects to fairly represent all their contributors in its success without complicated arrangements. Students are asked to consider if they can build a framework to bring together a community of developers and content creators to support their work together, and match the needs and the providers and possibly also automate the tracking and share of work done by each party in a project, allowing finances to be split representatively between the creators, allowing content providers a more exciting participation and risk taking involvement, while knowing that should the project succeed they have a clear entitlement to an amount of returns relative to the success of the project, rather than a flat rate for their hours.

Some careful consideration must go into how project assets are valued (How many points are agreed suitable for a certain job) and how can the framework support the group in making and communicating these details.

Option 2:

Interior Environment Creation

A constant difficulty in a large number of types of video games is the effort required in building suitable play environments, especially interior spaces, whether it be buildings, space ships, or other player explorable areas. Whilst for natural terrain many suitable automatic generation solutions exist, interior spaces, particular with some kind of functionality and utility services, such as power and water, are much harder to generate usefully. To further complicate the problem most games benefit from their terrains undergoing some design control to funnel play in a particular direction. Your challenge is to produce a software tool that allows the automatic creation of 3d interior spaces, giving some level of design control to the results, to allow them to be reshaped by a designer. Results should be viewable in 3d in a package or format of your choice. While the output is not required to rival the current range of latest games software, the system should be extensible to improve its level of output quality.

Option 3:

With this one I wanted to consider the potential in doing something with the more modern aspects of game development which are arising as concerns for developers at this point.

The two things I was considering were either looking at asking the students to produce something utilising multi-context rendering, as supported in Direct12. This would be a very focused technical project, and there are an almost infinite number of directions and applications this would take, but generally it would revolve around 'what bits of a render pipeline can be run together and how do we shuffle things to make it useful'.

The second was the potential of asking students to look at using OpenCL to parallelise route finding, and character logic, ( or some other essential game service which is quite heavily intertwined with the turn over of a running product ).

With these options I've been mulling them over and umming and arring about whether they would be appropriate, or just 'too dry' or involved as they may well not produce an exiting 'resulting app' given the time restraint for the project, and are mostly performance related projects.