Image: JKU
Little Victoria lost her will to face life. So she sets out to explore a dark world inspired by Victorian England, and always comes across exciting puzzles. The player has to solve this by not only changing the camera perspective or controlling the character, but also rotating the entire moving 3D game world. This is how the young protagonist should find her perspective again.
That is the concept of the game “Victoria” by Thomas Landl, Jeronimo Rädler and Jan Korytar. In the “Game Development” course, the three students developed their own video game from concept through design to programming. “It wasn’t always easy because the technology was new to us. But we still didn’t give up,” says Landl, who is in his sixth semester studying Artificial Intelligence at the JKU.
Persistence paid off: In the circus of knowledge at Kepler University, visitors were able to test all the games that were created in the “Game Development” course – and voted “Victoria” their favorite.
practical skills
The fact that the students program their own video games should not only serve to promote their creativity. “They also think about user experience, design and project management,” says Günter Wallner, who runs “Game Development” with colleagues Claire Dormann and Letian Wang.
In this year’s edition of the course, which takes place every semester, the students implemented a large number of creative ideas. Together with her colleague Mark Peyrer, Christina Planer from Linz, from the Computer Science bachelor’s degree, developed the game “Detective Mau” – at least the first chapter, the duo wants to program more as part of their bachelor’s theses.
In the game, the eponymous detective – the cat Mau – investigates a missing person case and is drawn into a computer in which she has to solve puzzles. “After brainstorming, we liked this idea the best. We both like cats,” says the student. The work was initially demanding, but then the two made rapid progress, Christina Planer continues. She particularly recommends programming video games to young women: “If there is interest, they should pursue it – even if it is traditionally a male domain.”
The third game that was particularly popular with visitors to the Circus of Knowledge is “Deus Cult” by Jakob Peham, Mateo Adzaga and David Chen. The somewhat brutal story: As a follower of a religious cult, the player is tasked with gaining followers by kidnapping them. Based on the idea of setting their game in a medieval world, they developed a “dungeon crawler”: The player explores underground passages with the character. In these he repeatedly meets opponents who have to be defeated.
“The implementation was less difficult than it was time-consuming. Areas such as project management that are not directly related to programming were complicated for us,” says Mateo Adzega, who is currently doing his master’s degree in computer science.
Source: Nachrichten
