Due: Thursday February 13th
Deliverables: Live demonstration of an interactive game environment you have created + documentation of what you did
Group size: 2-3 people
Part of grade: 10%

Student Presentation Groups

This project is to ensure that you take a close look at an existing game engine and the tools that come with it. The main idea is that you become familiar with some of the features provided and get a hands-on experience with creating a game with the engine. If you are using an engine that is already familiar to you, make sure you explore features you have never had the chance to explore before.

Pick an existing game engine that you have access to (several game engines, e.g. Unreal Engine, Unity and Cry Engine, can be used for free in non-commercial projects) and use it to create an interesting interactive environment that could be the start of a game. Demonstrate this environment for 5-6 minutes on the due date in class and hand in a document explaining what you did.

Please note: It can be very daunting to open up the editing tools for a game engine. The options are overwhelming and it is not at all obvious how to even get a very simple environment started. Therefore, you need to rely on available tutorials! There are for example a lot of YouTube videos showing you how to do things in the most popular game engines. Use those! Things don't have to be completely original. However, you should see if you can improvise a little as well, e.g. by changing the shape of the environment and introducing new elements - be creative. Also, make sure to explain in your documentation what tutorials you were building on.

Your presentation can last for a maximum of 8 minutes total. You should not need any slides. Just talk and demo. Within the time limit, you need to do the following:

1. Introduce your team. All members need to be present and should take turns during the presentation to receive the grade. Absence needs to be explained ahead of time.
2. After saying what engine you are using, you need to quickly state what existing materials and resources you are building on, e.g. “We went through the terrain tutorial videos from John Smith, goth some really great textures from Texture World and put it all together into an original landscape.”
3. Also say up-front where you spent most of your creative effort, e.g. “We made a couple of models from scratch” or “We really focused on understanding the particle system and generated a new kind of effect”. We need to hear this up-front because then we can look for those things during the demo.
4. Give your technical live demonstration. *Important:* Any good technical demonstration follows a sequence/path you have worked out and rehearsed ahead of time. This is to ensure that you tell a good story to the audience and don't end up wasting time looking for things to show. You don't have a lot of time for the demo and therefore you need to rehearse your timing. Also, by preparing this ahead of time you don't have to “debug” your demo during the presentation.
   • During the demo, point out the technologies you are applying (e.g. terrain, particles, physics, etc.)
   • For at least one of these technologies, tell us something a bit more than you can read off the engine's feature list E.g. if you used physics, tell us what third party technology is behind it, how (or if) you needed to prepare your models in any special way for use with the physics engine, and maybe whether you think the physics are being hardware accelerated.

*Hint:* You can almost think of this as your effort to convince other technically minded people in a game company why the company should use (or not use) the engine you picked

There are two things you need to hand in:

1. Document: A 1-2 page document that explains the exact same things as are outlined during the presentation (see above)
2. Screen capture video: Use screen capture software (e.g. Fraps to capture a run through your demo. Compress that capture and either submit it into MySchool along with the document if it is small enough or submit a link to it. You do not have to provide narration. The video and the document will tell the story together.

This project will be graded on:

• Technical soundness (did you get the demo to work?)
• Knowledge and amount of effort (did you clearly spend time on figuring things out?)
• Clarity of presentation (do you explain and pace your demo well?)
• Creativity (did you include a personal touch or a twist?)

• Cry Engine
• Torque 3D
• NeoAxis (Based on Ogre 3D)
• Unreal Engine 3 (UDK) (or use Unreal Editor with any Unreal game)
• Unity Engine
• Id Software Engines - Sources
• RAGE toolkit (id Tech 5)

• More Complete List of Game Engines