Sentimental Gamer

Today was very touching…

BOOM was today. For the uninitiated, that’s Bits On Our Minds, which is a general hodgepodge engineering exhibition where different student project groups get a table in the beautiful atrium of Duffield Hall (big engineering building) and extol the wonders of their work. Recruiters come (from Cisco and the like), students come, and local Ithacans come.

So, as with Guardin’ the Garden last year, I entered a game project. The idea, though, wasn’t my own. While I really enjoyed my time on Music Monsters, the fact is that in the end, it was flawed. As is true with so many things, the last little bit really counts. I think we made it 95% of the way there last spring, but we just didn’t have time to cap it off. Touch up the collision detection, balance the levels, fix music lab bugs, fix MIDI bugs… all the polish that I would have loved to have given it if we had time. But we just ran out of time, and then it was off to Oracle and…well, and so on.

So, the group convinced me to submit Music Monsters. Pre-BOOM, I’m thinking this is going to be horrible. Watching the memory leaks (well, “loitering objects”, I should say… C# is managed) kill our game within minutes after all our work was devastating, as was noticing that levels hadn’t saved correctly. Also, I found that the game blew up on exiting tutorial levels. Great. So, I manually fixed up the XML level files for the tutorials this morning, added a null reference check or two, and decided to just grin and bear it. I was pretty sure BOOM would consist of trying to explain away to college kids why our project had so many errors.

But, instead, a group of maybe 6 to 8 kids from a few different local families latched onto it, and the kids absolutely LOVED it! The oldest couldn’t have been over 10 or 11, with the youngest probably under 5, and after I explained the game to them, they were all jockeying in turn to play it again and again and again! Even more surprisingly, to me, they actually grasped how it worked!!! I had thought it was all just too obtuse and glitchy to matter, but by the end of BOOM, I heard them stating exactly how they wanted to change different attributes, and how they could do so in the music lab! “I want to make him bigger to crush things… play a lot of chords!” “I want to be fast… play fast notes!” “I need to dive more… make his tail bigger with low notes!”. After figuring that nobody ever would get the system, it really was magical to see them pick up and use it!

So, while any college student or older person may have picked up the game out of curiosity and dropped it the next minute because of its technical and presentational issues, these kids played 2 hours, and we had to turn them away so we could pack up in the end! That, I believe, is all I could have asked for. I think it’s true for every medium (I know writers always say it): if only one person enjoys and loves my book/movie/music/game, then I’ve done my job. I got to live that feeling again today. It’s pretty much the warmest, fuzziest feeling there is :).