Friday, May 17, 2013

Memories of SLIIT Codefest 2012 - People's Award Winner

It's been a long time since I blogged the last post.... thought of recalling the memories of the SLIIT Code Fest 2012 as this year's event is coming nearby...

It was the toughest coding project I've ever done up to now.... not because of it was hard.. but because of the limited time we got to develop our project... 

As I can remember we had the 3rd year 2nd semester exams at SLIIT until October 17th... and the Code Fest Competition was on 19th. Until the exams were over we couldn't find any time to develop something for Code Fest although we had got registered for the competition. Soon after the exam was over on 17th evening, we got together to plan something to be developed.. As always, Guru, Mihiran and Hiran were with me in the team... In order to align with the theme 'Mobile Gaming', we had to develop a game to be run on a mobile platform. The following are the photos that were taken while we were planning the game to be developed.

Guru & Mihiran

Hiran & Me

The planning was very quick.. we had no time to waste as the clock was ticking.. I had the idea to develop a game that I used to play when I was in Grade 3 at school (in 1998) in a 2D brick game where it had a life guard and the player had to save the passengers of a sinking ship from a shark. 

We divided the tasks where Mihiran took over designing all the graphics in the game. I had to take over most of the coding part as Hiran and Guru were in their internships at MIT and Virtusa.. (At that time I had just finished my internship at Central Bank and was waiting for the internship at Virtusa to commence). 

Mihiran and I spent the 17th night at Hiran's place where we had a sleepless night developing the game.. We didn't use any game engine.. programmed everything from the scratch... We used images in the game and controlled their movements using threads. Windows Phone 7.5 was the platform we selected and used Silverlight and C# for programming. 

We also had to design a banner for the game to be displayed during the competition. Mihiran designed it and we printed it on a canvas.    


Mihiran holding the banner he designed

Here's the final product. We named our game as 'Shark Attack'. It came really nicely with all the animations and graphics. 



Until last minute I was coding... fixing bugs in the threads.. as for each animation.. it had separate threads..  This photo was taken few minutes before the competition.


There were nearly 10 competitors in the Open Category. We had to present our game as the very first presentation in Open Category. 

So Finally we won the People's Award in SLIIT Code Fest 2012. It was a great experience where we programmed the game in just 1 day and still managed to win an award... 



Here's the award we got.. 


The Team.. From left to right... Mihiran, Me, Hiran and Guru.... 


Here's a promotional video prepared by Mihiran....



Special thanks to Manesha Gunathillake... our Mentor of the project... who motivated and guided us.... and organized everything.. 

Those memories will never be shaded...... great times at SLIIT..


Tharindu Edirisinghe
SLIIT 10'