It wasn’t long before the idea machine started to churn, and once the wheels of the idea machine were lubricated by beer as the team adjourned to the (conveniently close-at-hand) Pit and Pendulum, we started to generate some great material. A few sparks of inspiration caught, and a solid game plan began to emerge. The idea was to use the ouroboros’ links to Greek mythology regarding life, death, rebirth and immortality, and make a game revolving around the conflict between the ouroboros and the phoenix as they battle to become the only true immortal. The player would take the role of the phoenix, casting fire at their enemies and using their own death as an explosive weapon. With a few pages of hastily-scribbled notes, the team returned to the hackspace to get started.

Now, 24 hours down the line, it’s really coming together. Jacob has provided some great art, and the code is coming together to make it move about and do stuff. We have a phoenix that flies about the screen under the player’s control, and enemies appear and fly towards it. The background scrolls, and scenery items drift past with mock-parallax to give a sense of depth. Test flames litter the screen, and the phoenix can capture them, whereupon they’ll swirl around it as a shield. It’s taken us a little while, and there have been some real head-scratch moments along the way, but it’s definitely getting there. We might even get something playable before the finish time tomorrow.

Next up, we’re working on having the flames to deal damage to the enemies, and adding death events for the enemies and the player. At that point, we’ll have actual gameplay! Then it’s just a matter of adding a final boss fight, and  some UI elements – a menu before gameplay, and a game over screen after it.

Hopefully, we should have something exciting to show when we finish!

So, watch this space for updates on our progress – we’ll be posting news throughout the competition, and there will be a full news post afterwards to let you know the results!

In the new year we will be covering an introduction to NerfCore, so if you haven’t already, head over to http://nerfgames.co.uk/forums and get registered for your engine key.

To test your understanding of this week’s work, go back to the problem set last week and extend it to use the type of text menu we made this week, add a List to store objects, write the ToString overrides and have a go at implementing a Search by Name and BubbleSort. The last two will be a bit of a challenge, but are both manageable, so give them a go!

Workshops – This week we covered writing slightly more complex classes, inheritance and polymorphism. The example solution is available at http://devsoc.co.uk/2011/12/c-workshop-2-shapeinheritance/, which we will be using next week for our last workshop of term.

TGI Friday – Nick is going to speak to TGIs about securing our table. It is booked for 7pm on the 6th December, please try and arrive a bit early because there are a lot of us to seat. If you have paid a deposit to Nick, £5 will come off your bill at the end of the night.

Tshirts and Hoodies – Nick is dealing with ordering these, if you want one but you aren’t sure if he knows yet, have a word with him to tell him you are interested. Once we have enough to meet the minimum order, we’ll start dealing with money and sizes etc.

Projects – If you have a project idea and want to tell people about it, register for an account here (Link on the left hand bar) and email admin@devsoc.co.uk your name and username so that you can be given author privileges and start sharing news and screenshots etc for your project.

NerfGames forums – If you are interested in playing/beta testing NerfCore or any of the games being made by NerfGames, register on the NerfGames forums at http://nerfgames.co.uk/forums and pm shadow telling him you’re part of DevSoc and your N-Number and you will be added to the DevSoc group. Also follow the instructions on the Get The Engine post to get access to the NerfCore downloads.

To test if you understand the concepts behind this, try creating your own C# project and creating an abstract Person class to store Name and Age, and then create Staff and Student classes that inherit from the Person class. The Staff class should store data about their office and module that they teach, the student class should have a course that they are enrolled on and a grade for first year.

Next week we will be introducing Lists to store collections of data, Getters and Setters and overriding methods from the C# base object class to make outputting data about an object easier. Don’t worry if this sounds confusing, it’ll make sense by the end of the workshop!

GameCity is an annual computer games festival run in association with NTU and various other partners (check out their website for a list), which seems to take over the entire city for half term week, most notably with a huge tent on market square.

As well as the DevSoc stand, there will be almost a hundred other events and exhibitors in venues around the city, ranging from Projector Games – massively multplayer games on one huge screen – to names such as Eurocom’s Tony Wills who’ll be talking about the Motion Capture used in Goldeneye 007: Reloaded, and there’s even a Zombie Pageant on Friday afternoon.

For more info, come down and visit us – entry to most events is free! For more information, you can check out their website, gamecity.org, or follow their Twitter stream.

It’s all change at DevSoc this year, with a new President, new members, new projects and a shiny new website. We have all sorts of exciting projects lined up, including robot mice, building a 3D printer, and making games for PC, XBox and Android. We’ll be at the GameCity festival from October 26^th, and we’re planning a special event of our own later in the year. So keep watching this page for updates and articles on everything we’re up to!