Underworld Hockey Club 0->0.2
Around 2005, EA stopped producing hockey games for the PC. I was in the first year of grad school, focusing on computer graphics. I had no interest in buying an XBOX or the field of computer graphics, but didn’t know the second part yet. While other students in the lab were doing some amazing research, I was determined to make a hockey game with real physics. I had a vision of players getting checked and turning into ragdolls, flying through the glass, toppling over the boards. I wanted to take the most intense parts of hockey and make them even more extreme. Most of all, I didn’t want to do research in computer graphics.
Enter UHC: Underworld Hockey Club. I integrated the bullet 3d physics engine with the Open Source Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE). I didn’t know anything about databases, art pipelines, or making games. Deciding when to turn a player into a ragdoll was a tough math problem that I enjoyed. The game was really fun for a few minutes, but without any progression or story (what can you say about skeleton armies playing hockey in hell?), it gives away the farm and has no redeemable gameplay value. Still, it’s pretty fun to smash skeletons into walls and maybe someone can bring it back from the dead.
My first PhD advisor was an angry man with a handlebar moustache. He was less than amused with Underworld Hockey Club. About half way through development of UHC, my PhD advisor spontaneously kicked me out of the lab and gave me an F on a “research credits” course that was supposed to be non-graded. I assumed this was because I accomplished almost no research of value, but then I found out later that this happened to several other students in the lab, even some productive ones. If you ever wanted to know What happens to professors with tenure when a regular employee would have gotten fired?, I know the answer. They end up receiving random titles & responsibilities. Is your PhD advisor “Dean of Student Library Studies”? Run away. In hindsight, getting kicked out of the Graphics lab was one of the best things to happen to me, although I was really upset about it at the time.
After a couple of years of part-time work on UHC, I submitted a video and a copy of the game to the Indie Awards. It received terrible reviews. I’m still really proud of being able to cobble this together with no prior knowledge of game development. The feeling of checking another player through the glass is euphoric. Being able to body check the Devil is satisfying. Having a vision up-front ensures that you don’t rely solely on other people to define your success.
Here’s a very silly pitch video for Underworld Hockey Club:
The Good
The moments where the skater-to-ragdoll worked *just* right is so incredibly satisfying. It’s like a birdwatcher getting that perfect picture, except you are watching a demon get thrown through a sheet of glass or a skeleton get body slammed.
The Bad
There were no unit tests in the code and I built many things by hand (e.g. my own database) so bugs grinded the production of the game to a halt.
The Ugly
Because there aren’t many graded courses in a PhD program, I carry an abysmal PhD GPA. I still remember the fear struck through me when Google asked for my PhD GPA as part of the hiring process.
The Takeaway
I learned almost everything in UHC the “hard way”. Reading books/blogs or watching videos on game design would have saved countless hours and resulted in a much better game. Building UHC taught me that I need to do my research before starting a project. In that sense, it was an extremely valuable research project. I think I deserve an A for that. Ok maybe not.
After UHC, I became more methodical about reading papers and discussing ideas before diving into the code.