At Ohio State, all freshmen engineering students (regardless of discipline), are required to take fundamentals of engineering. The class attempts to level out the playing field regardless of prior high school experience by starting with the basics. Fundamentals of Engineering Honors starts with Excel, transitions to MATLAB, and then ends with C (anda a very small amount of C++). The end of the semester places everyone into groups of two, and gives students time to program a video game that they get to share with their class.

The video game uses the Ohio State's proprietary game enging (the proteus simulator) which allows the students to make basic games by programming with C. Groups were formed at random, and then students were allowed to make whatever they wanted, but they were encouraged to make a relatively basic game as there was only about a week left in the semester. When Caleb and I were paired together, we went through a couple of ideas, but only one really stuck. Pokemon. We had both grown up playing the games, it has a humongous fan base, and it has pixelated graphics (The Proteus display is only 320x240).

So we knew we wanted to do Pokemon, the question then became how can we distill Pokemon into something that can be made in about a week. Our solution was to focus on only the battles. No overworld, no catching Pokemon, just the battles. This is very similar to the elite four, within the actual pokemon games.

Instead of using generic photos, we decided to base the characters on the students in our class. This put a fun spin on the game and let us hide easter-eggs for each of the different characters. For example, the character for my partner Caleb had a move titled Band Blast because he was a member of the Ohio State Marching Band. Another one of my classmates (Alec) had a move titled Thunder because his high school mascot was a thunderhawk.

Once all of our ideas were laid out, we had to get to work quickly. We only had a little over a week to make the game. I decided to make a test version of the game using the backgrounds while Caleb utilized his artistic abilities to render our classmates as pixel. While working on this I used a crocodile pokemon as a placeholder.

We probably bit off more work than we should have, but I was determined to make the game work. At around 6am the moring our presentation, I finally got everything patched together and ready to show our class. All of the groups in our class put their games on their computers and everyone was allowed to play their games. As this happend, it became clear that our game was a hit. At the end of the class period, the students were allowed to vote for whatever game they thought was best. Our Pokemon game won, so we then got to display our game at the Freshman Engineering Showcase.

It was a lot of work in the moment, but looking back on the project I'm super happy with how it went. I got way better at C, I made everyone in the class happy, and I had a great time working with Caleb. As someone who has always loved video games, it let me view them from a whole different angle. The best games aren't built on graphics, they're built on creating a challenge that people can enjoy and ultimately overcome.