About
GAMES:EXETER is a small group in the Computer Science department of the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter. The group was created to foster the development of academic and educational games events at Exeter. The key focus of which is the creation of competitions to help develop student programming skills as well as their understanding and experience of Artificial Intelligence methods and paradigms. Following two successful internal AI games programming competitions we are now expanding our focus by opening the student competition to any taught student in the UK.
The working group was first created in 2008 by Kent McClymont and Max Dupenois in order to organise an internal games AI programming competition for the undergraduate computer scientists. This first competition required participants to develop an AI player for a 1-dimension strategy game called "Toroid Wars". Kent and Max developed the game and player interface allowing the students to focus on the task of programming good AI.
Following the success of this first competition, the "Toroid Wars" theme was developed further, extending the toroidal battle into 2-dimensions with a wrapping surface and team tank battle. As before, the game engine and player interface was developed for the students to reduce the amount of time required to develop a working player. This competition was kindly sponsored by Creative Assembly. As part of the sponsorship, Ingimar Gudmundsson, an AI developer at Creative Assembly, visited the university and gave a seminar on his experience of AI development on real games.
A key aim of the undergraduate competition is to encourage student learning outside of the normal lecture and workshop environments. The general experiences of participants were observed as part of the monitoring and improvement process. The conclusions from these observations were presented at the HEA's 10th One Day Workshop for the Teaching of Programming. This event also appeared in the local press, Express & Echo and The Herald.
Following two successful internal AI games programming competitions we are now expanding our focus by opening the student competition to any taught student in the UK.
