By Katie E. Ismael and Kimberley Clementi

In 2003, there was Star Control and a mission in outer space. In 2015, Battle Blocks fought for lunch money in the sandbox. In 2019, three hungry animals stole Chef Cheoffrey’s birthday cake; he was determined to catch them all.

Flash forward to 2022. It was demo day for students in UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department’s CSE 125 course.

The 2022 edition of CSE 125 featured a timed race between folding chairs and bean bags; a fast-paced beauty pageant where only one race car wins the crown; a farm with a dark twist; a game of cat and mouse; a magical battle in a medieval castle.

In other words, demo day featured five spanking-new, 3D multiplayer games–  the end result of 10  weeks of creativity, imagination, engineering skill and teamwork for CSE students.

As with previous years, the latest teams demonstrated their creations to an audience on the big screen, showcasing the Chairioteers, Skrrt Skirt, Farmers Market, The Meoze Runner and Eternal Ritual games. (Catch them here and read more about the teams here.)

While the 2022 teams certainly had the benefit of 22 years of tremendous technological advancements, some things about CSE Professor Geoff Voelker’s beloved course have remained the same.

We talk to Professor Voelker about CSE 125’s evolution—and consistency—in an ever-changing industry.

What do you enjoy most about teaching this course?

What I enjoy most is providing the opportunity for students to achieve what seems like an impossible goal: to design and implement a multi-player, 3D networked game from scratch in just 10 weeks. It really is a phenomenal achievement, and each year, I’m repeatedly impressed by the creativity, dedication and talent of the students in the class.

How has gaming changed throughout your years of teaching the class?

Short answer: A lot!

The technology has obviously changed immensely since I first started teaching the class.  The hardware today is orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the early 2000s.  In the early years, groups had to spend significant effort optimizing their code to make their games run reasonably well on old hardware. Today it’s much less of a concern. The hardware platform can comfortably run whatever the students are able to develop in just a 10-week quarter.

The game industry has also changed immensely.

Entirely new markets have been created: the 2000s saw the rise and peak of browser gaming using Flash; when smartphones arrived in the 2010s the mobile gaming market was born; in the mid-2010s Pokémon Go made artificial reality (AR) gaming a worldwide phenomenon.

Entirely new types of games have also been created: two genres that CSE 125 students in particular picked up on were “tower defense games” and “cooperative games” where all of the players work together to solve puzzles or survive the environment.

How have these changes impacted your teaching approach?

Oddly, these changes haven’t impacted my teaching approach much. Modern hardware has made the development process slightly easier, but it’s also the case that students aim for more. And over time I have asked at the start of the quarter whether there is much interest in targeting a different platform (e.g., mobile), but repeatedly students have expressed strong interest in working on the traditional PC platform.

In what ways does the course prepare them for their career pursuits?

In terms of preparation, one of the ways I describe the course is that it provides an opportunity for the students to take everything they’ve learned in their CSE courses and finally apply it to a challenging (and fun!) project. And in doing so, it helps underscore how broad game development is since it draws from so many areas of computer science.

But I think there is a more fundamental way in which CSE 125 prepares students, and it’s not just for the games industry. 

The students learn and apply a variety of technical skills in taking CSE 125, and certainly gain crucial technical experience in designing and implementing a complex system. But I don’t think it’s the technical aspects that benefit the students the most in preparing them for the next step of their careers.

Rather, it’s about working in a group.  At the start of the quarter, I tell the students that half of what they are going to learn is about how to work effectively in a group. I call it the three C’s:

o   how to collaborate

o   how to communicate

o   how to compromise

And in doing all of this (both the technical experience and the group experience), they gain the fourth ‘C’: confidence. I mean confidence in being able to tackle a very complex project working in a team, confidence in creating their own vision and making it a reality, confidence in solving hard problems on their own initiative along the way, confidence that they’ll take with them to the next step.

Are you a gamer? What are your favorites?

I am definitely a gamer. The first game I ever played was Hunt the Wumpus on a TRS-80 my parents rented when I was a kid.

I enjoy a wide variety of games, but particularly like open world games that let you explore interesting worlds created by imaginative teams. Recent examples of games I’ve been thoroughly impressed with are Control and Elden Ring.