News

Games Student Features on Microsoft's Influential Programming Site Channel9

19/06/2013

IT Carlow Games Student features on Microsoft's influential and widely-read programming site "channel9".  BA(Hons) in Games Development student Keith Cully's final year project featured on todays front page of Microsoft's influential and widely-read programming site.  The project is called "SticKart".

Abstract from the Channel 9 Website.

Today's project by Keith Cully is one that I've been looking forward to highlighting. Keith's project looks like a fun game, but beyond that he's actually created a NUI based level editor too. How cool is that?

You want more? How about some nice doc's?

More? Physics. Speech. SQL. Azure....

Even More? The source for it all is available too! See, I told you this was cool...

SticKart

SticKart is a 2D side-scrolling platformer which I created as my major final year college project. It utilizes the Kinect sensor for input and the target platform is Windows 7. All player actions control the actions of a stick man running through a mine. The player must run jump and crouch their way across platforms and past obstacles. They can also travel in a mine cart to give their legs a rest. The objective of the game is to set the high score on each level and the player can create their own levels once the game is complete.

...

The main features of the game are:

  1. Motion control using a gesture managment system which automatically recalibrates to suit each individual player's body dimensions.
  2. A bespoke player tracking system which filters the active player from the recognised skeletons.
  3. Voice control.
  4. A fully fledged NUI level editor.
  5. A bespoke NUI friendly menu system.
  6. A thread safe notification manager
  7. Local and online leaderboards (Online leaderboards are no longer active as my Azure subscription ran out).

The project is built using the following technologies:

  1. XNA
  2. Farseer Physics
  3. Kinect for Windows SDK v1.6
  4. Microsoft Speech platform
  5. Windows Communication Foundation
  6. Windows Azure
  7. IIS
  8. SQL