By Caelan Saunders

Reporter

This year, South proudly gets to present two students at a national competition where they will enter an original video game they created.

Juniors Cassidy Herrman and Anesu Mafuvadze won first place at a Technology Student Association (TSA) tournament in Rolla and will be representing South in Dallas at a national competition in June.

What started out as a cool, but crazy, idea soon became a reality for these two South students. Both Herrman and Mafuvadze wanted to create a fun and interactive video game and were able to, thanks to both of them being in engineering courses and being active members of TSA, the club that got them to this competition.

“Mr. Messick, who does the engineering and TSA stuff, showed us the competition, and me and Anesu decided we wanted to be partners after we looked at the qualifications because we felt like we could do it; I did the creative part of it, like the design, and Anesu did the technical programming,” said Herrman.

Mafuvadze’s programming skills are almost all completely self taught. He had a little help from engineering classes, but most was all him.

“I taught myself, pretty much, using Youtube. I started about three years ago. I taught myself HTML, C Sharp, Java script, and other real life programming,” said Mafuvadze.

The game was judged on creativity, level design, functionality, and the game design as a whole. The qualifications for this video game competition helped narrow the unlimited scope that creating a video game has. The game had to be less than 15 minutes long, have four unique levels, and try to incorporate educational concepts in it. It also had to be rated “E for Everyone” so that anyone, no matter their age, could play the game. The rating was at first hard for the team to get around.

“With E-rated games, you can’t have guns or weapons that can kill someone, so we had to improvise our gun and make it a shrink ray. It makes the enemies so small that they disappear,” said Herrman.

The original idea for the video game was to be a puzzle, ‘indie’ style game, that was an 8-bit side-scroller. It was going to originally be set in the medieval ages with wizards and potions and such, even including alternate endings, but unfortunately this was too much to do in the time that they had.

“That idea was scratched because it was really hard. We couldn’t get all the choice functions in to hook up with each other to make the ending, so we ended up just going with one solid ending,” said Herrman.

They also realized that based on the style that they wanted the game was getting too complex to properly do it and meet the qualifications. They ended up restarting months of work, and starting from scratch, a hard decision as so much time and effort went into the game they had created so far. They could still use the storyboards that Herrman made, but Mafuvadze had to restart completely.

The new game would revolve around a space theme, as the topic of space interests both students immensely; Herrman even wants to be an aerospace engineer one day. After everything was done, the video game took an entire 5 1/2 months to complete. Together with their new game, which was still an 8-bit side-scroller, they were able to take first place at a Missouri Science and Technology competition against seven other entries.

“Now, all we have to do for nationals is improve the game by making it longer and more complex,” said Herrman.

The competition will take place June 28-July 3 in Dallas.