A team of students in a Texas A&M visualization science class taught by Vinod Srinivasan saw its final project result not only in a good grade but also as a third-place finisher among more than 200 entries in a 2007 international game design competition sponsored by Microsoft.
As Team Sprockets, the students developed a game called “Sprockets of Strife,” which challenges players to outlast one another in a battle of customizable robots called Sprockets. In the game, players prevail by using cunning and tricky strategies, not just strength and speed.
Team Sprockets consisted of Alethea Bair, a Ph.D. student in architecture; Philip Degarmo, a senior computer science major; Lars Doucet and Chris Wheeler, graduate visualization science students; Daniel Griffing, a 2007 music graduate; and Thomas Roth, a senior computer science major. Matt Monson, a spring 2007 computer science graduate, was also on the original team. He was hired by Microsoft, and was therefore ineligible to continue active development.
The group entered its game in the Dream-Build-Play Challenge Contest, which drew entries from game designers from around the world. The game is available for download at http://teamsprockets.com.
“Sprockets of Strife” got its start in a class called Introduction to Game Design. Vinod Srinivasan, assistant professor of visualization, who has long had an interest in bringing video games studies to academia, encouraged students to study games, write papers, and as a final project, to produce a game of their own design.
“We’re thankful for the formal education we’ve received from Texas A&M,” said Degarmo, lead programmer for Team Sprockets. “Game development merges many diverse technical challenges into a single project. While many of these challenges have courses devoted towards them, such as networking and graphics, I’ve found few opportunities that give such broad working technical knowledge and team experience as game development.”
The team credits its success to the prior experience of many of its members.
"A lot of us were members of the Texas Aggie Game Developers," a registered student organization at Texas A&M, said Doucet. "Philip, Matt and I all got our start there. Most of us didn't know anything before we joined and started tinkering with stuff."
This third place victory is not the first success story to come out of the Texas Aggie Game Developers.
In summer 2006, Matt Monson and fellow TAGD member Danny Dyer worked as interns for Carbonated Games, a Microsoft-owned game studio, where they developed the title “Aegis Wing,” now available for XBOX 360. Matt Monson is currently working for Microsoft Game Studios, doing work on an unannounced title.
In spring 2008, the Texas A&M computer science department launched its own computer game-programming course taught by Scott Schaefer of computer science. The course is specifically designed to bring together teams of students to work on one or more games throughout the semester with the intention of submitting their work to contests such as Dream-Build-Play and, hopefully, yielding more success stories such as this one.
