Aspiring Game Programmer Extraordinaire

WPI – December, 2007

PC

Official Website

Summary

Besides an archetectural description of the innerworkings of the intarwebz, A Series of Tubes is a first-person 3D maze game based on the popular children’s board game Chutes and Ladders.  Players must navigate through a complex network of tubes and wacky rooms to reach the “end of the internet:” a series of tubes.  The game was created by 5 WPI students (2 programmers and 3 artists) in 3 weeks using the C4 Engine (Windows, C++), Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe Photoshop.  The game was completed in December, 2007 for the WPI class IMGD 3000: Technical Game Development I.

My role and lessons learned

I was the primary coder for this project.  I helped design and code gameplay.  The portal system was my main contribution to the project.  As this was the first game that everyone in the team had ever made, the scope and complexity were toned down significantly.  Having a small scope helped leave room for polish, while avoiding crunch time.  I learned through this project how to manage assets, set up BSP trees, and design a simple, fun prototype game.  I also gained experience in team-based project work, scheduling weekly project milestones, and working in a significant C++ codebase.

Trailer

Awards

A Series of Tubes won the following awards at the first ever WPI IMGD Showfest.  Showfest is an annual exhibition of all the student games created that year.  Unlike recent showfests, the year A Series of Tubes was completed, Kent Quirk from Linden Lab and Michael Gesner from Dragonfly Game Design judged the games presented.  They each played the role of Publisher, rating the performance of the groups on various criteria.  The students in attendance also voted on crowd favorites.

• Best Overall (audience)
• Most Novel (audience)
• Most Fun (audience)
• Best Sound
• Best Sound (audience)

Team 9001

• Brian Hettrick (Art, Music,  Level design)
• Pat McAnneny (Art)
• Joe Strong (Art)
• Tim Poliquin (Tech)
• Myself (Tech)

Play

Download the game (436 MB)