Library Hosts Game Developer

Ever wonder how those characters move around the screen in a computer game? How does that sword wielding hero know he has to walk around a wall or avoid a fire breathing dragon to fight the bad guys? The student members of the Hopkinton High School Programming Club now know how that happens.

Game Programmer and Author Dan Higgins discussed the topic with the young coders last Tuesday afternoon at the library. The January 11th library program was a follow up session to a December presentation, also done by Higgins, entitlef “Secrets of Game Development”.

The topic for Tuesday's presentation was, in technical programming circles, referred to as path finding. The small but attentive crowd listened to Higgins describe the general principles of writing path finding code. Using one of his own game creations, Higgins elaborated on the concepts using a well know path finding computer algorithm know as A*. A computer algorithm is a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task. In this case the task is efficiently moving from point A to point B.

But, conceptually describing how the code works only goes so far, it was time to look at the code. Higgins stepped through some of the actual code segments he used to move the hero about in his game. Going into more detail, Higgins referenced some of the chapters he's written that explain the process in very specific and precise detail. To underscore the importance of the subject, Higgins emphasized there is nothing more important in game design then writing near perfect path finding code.

Wherever he could, Higgins reiterated one common theme related to writing path finding code; it takes a long time to get it right. For some of his Empire series games Higgins said he wrote the bulk of the code over a few weekends, but it took him almost a year to get the code working almost flawlessly.

While some of the more esoteric details may have eluded the club members, it didn't seem to dampen their interest. They followed Higgins through every complex concept and idea and presented a number of well thought out questions at the end of the presentation. Perhaps we were hearing from future game developers?

Hopkinton resident Dan Higgins currently works at MathWorks. He's also worked as a game programmer for local companies including Stainless Steel Studios and Tilted Mill. Higgins has worked on such popular games as “Empire Earth” and “Empires: Dawn of the Modern Word.