Seniors Make Final Tweaks to CSE 125 Multiplayer Videogames

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Team A42JS’s game is a third-person, cooperative, horror-themed survival game.

It's not often that the final project presentations of an undergraduate computer-science course can attract a standing-room-only audience of students and visitors from across campus. But that's par for the course when Computer Science and Engineering professor Geoffrey M. Voelker's CSE 125 course draws to a close each spring quarter.

The teams taking CSE 125 this year will be presenting and demonstrating their projects this Friday, June 9, from 4pm-5:30pm in the Calit2 Auditorium of Atkinson Hall. The demo is open to the general public, and anyone is welcome to join in the excitement -- as select audience members are invited on stage to play the games produced by Voelker's students, most of them graduating seniors. (The demos will also be streamed online, details to come later.)

The game Dungeon Party combines dungeon-crawling, part-game and strategic-level design

The goal of CSE 125 is for students to experience the design and implementation of a large, complex, distributed software system with real-time constraints, and to do so in large groups. For motivation, the project assignment was to build a distributed, real-time, 3D, multiplayer game... in just 10 weeks.

"The course is also an opportunity for the students to take everything that they have learned in their classes over the years and apply it to one project in one quarter," said Voelker. "As you'll see, they have learned a tremendous amount. The projects are amazing."

For a preview, each team has uploaded content about their games to group web pages available here.

Heliocentric’s space-based game

Each group web page has a project design, project specification, weekly status reports, screenshots, and more. Taken together, the documents chart the progress of the groups and the evolution of their projects through the quarter.

At the demos, Voelker will briefly introduce the course, then each team will demonstrate their projects and invite volunteers from the audience to join team members in playing their games. Different volunteers will be invited to each of the five games produced by the 32 students in this year's course.