Code Camp 2011
Starting at 6pm on November 10th, Code Camp began. Code Camp is an open, yearly competition held at Dixie State College where programmers compete over a 24 hour period to see who can develop the best mobile or web application. Simply put, it was a blast. There was lots of people to interact with, and endless food and caffeinated beverages to aid us in our 24-hour journey, also, feee swag is always a win! I got myself a new t-shirt and lanyard! (It’s a nerd thing.)
My team, “The Companion Cubes,” formed on the ride to St. George and quickly threw together ideas. Our team comprised of Jay Kansarga, Faye Phillips, Issac Gifford, and myself, all of us being either Computer Science or Information Systems majors. We decided that we would create a web application based in HTML5 and JavaScript, thus allowing us to work across not only desktop platforms, but also branch out to mobile environments.
Issac quickly jumped into programming our battle engine, while Jay setup character movement and interaction. Faye was our artists, she created all the artwork in our game. My primary responsibility was creating the game environment. You can see the maps I made above. I created the tiles form an open source document and used primarily Adobe Fireworks to compile them together into a landscape. As you can tell, I went for a “classic” RPG look, keeping things simple so that we can meet our short deadline.
After a painstaking 24 hours, we finally competed our project, which you can play here: http://geekingreen.ifox.com/html5/CCRPG/
Application complete, we presented our project. Our hopes high, but confidence a bit low, we were very proud of our game, but in the shadow of the seasoned professionals in the room creating intracute mobile applications, we had doubts on our outcome. Long story short, we didn’t place, but not only did we enjoy ourselves, we were exposed to a great learning environment and we got a glimpse of what we need are going to need to top next year.
Watch out Code Camp 2012, Team Companion Cube is comin’ for you!
