"Devcathlon" Game

Had a blast in 2008, welcomed the New Year, out with the old. A new semester at the University of Hawaii, taking the new software engineering course two with Dr. P. Johnson.

Right now, the project for the class is to develop a similar game (http://www.ddj.com/cpp/184401568?pgno=1) that will reward and deduct points from a group of people. The points are based on if a person fails a build (does not have automated tools [PMD, FindBugs, Checkstyle, and etc.], does not pass Junit test case runs, and/or does not compile). There are other ways the points can be given out. The game will be called “Devcathlon”; the ‘dev’ is for code development, the ‘cathlon’ is similar to the Olympic event Decathlon. The game racks up points for each developer and at the end of a time length, the group of developers can see who racked up the most points and have bragging rights for the time being.

Before the class begins working out the code, GUI, and the works of this game, each of us have to find out what makes a game “good?” I took a game designing class a year ago, and this question was brought up to us on the second day of class. The class used Adobe Flash, and we did animated games, you can view the games I done by clicking on the following link: http://sites.google.com/site/phillipkhlau/projects-page. Back to the subject, what makes a good game, so I read an article (http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/games/goodgame.html) and I agreed with the points the author made, it got to be fun, it has to be balance between the AI and player, player and player and etc. Other points includes getting the player hooked onto the game, there are certain games that I played and got bored of it (I have one or two games where I still did not get though the story) and there are some games where I finished it in three – four days. This article http://www.gamegrene.com/node/591 I read, talks about why Halo is a good game, maybe because they are “fun.” That is one good point; the game has to be fun to the player. Another site I read was a forum site; it was asking why the game Silent Hill is scary, what makes it scary http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=horror&thread.id=41323, another point of making a good game is probably the surprises that come along with the game.

Taking what I read about making a good game into making the Devcathlon system. The system can have “surprises” like extra rewards (like reward of 20 consecutive successful builds) and deductions. Can have some animation in it, in this day and age, I do not think a text-only game will be “fun” (I might be wrong). Can the points be useable, or it is just there.