Game Time

The third annual mobiLEHIGH competition is coming up, so I thought I'd start a blog.

As background, mobiLEHIGH is a game programming competition held at Lehigh University each year.  The rules are pretty simple:

• You can work in teams of up to 4 students
• You have 2 months to make a game
• The game has to run on a tablet or phone
• You cannot use copyrighted material

Starting in the last week of January, our Programming Club (technically the "Lehigh University Student Chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery") begins hosting sessions to help students learn a bit about programming games.  We assume that contestants might not have any programming experience at all, even though most teams have at least one Computer Science major.

Part of what I love about mobiLEHIGH is that a lot of students use my game framework, the Lehigh Overlay for LibGDX (a.k.a., liblol).  It's just about guaranteed that someone is going to use my code to do something that I didn't think it could do, and that's always cool.  It's also likely that someone is going to ask me to add a new feature, and then I'll find myself wondering why I didn't have that feature in there all along.  I can't wait to see what ideas come up!

The other great thing about mobiLEHIGH is that it increases visibility for Computer Science on campus.  Every year, 128 first-year engineers sign up for a mobile game development project that I offer as part of the Introduction to Engineering Practice class.  In 5 weeks, they make some pretty cool games, but only the first-year engineering cohort ever sees all of my students' hard work.  Similarly, every year, about 100 seniors present their Computer Science senior projects, but very few people from outside the department come to the poster session.  MobiLEHIGH provides a venue for all of campus to see one of the fun sides of Computer Science, and to get people thinking about whether they would enjoy adding more Computer Science to their Lehigh experience.  With accredited undergraduate bachelor of science degrees offered through all three undergraduate colleges, as well as both a bachelor of arts and a minor, there are just so many ways that students can develop skill in Computer Science at Lehigh, without needing a fifth year.  And since the Computer Science department does not restrict class enrollment to its majors, anyone can take Computer Science classes, without committing to one of our degrees.

If you are a student at Lehigh University, or another school in the Lehigh Valley, and you want to get started with mobiLEHIGH a little early, visit the liblol github page and check out the code!  And if you're not going to participate in mobiLEHIGH, but you want to learn a little bit about game programming, then keep following along.  I plan on blogging more about liblol in the next few weeks.