The Q*bert Project

Choosing My Poision

For the Fall 2006 semester, my Computer Graphics class (CS 455) includes a semester project of creating a 3D video game. Since there are 4 other projects, we essentially have only 7 weeks to really work on it. For that reason, nobody's creating the next Halo or Quake!

The professor suggested finding a vintage game that can effectively be "translated" into three dimensions and can fulfill the requirements of the semester project. Being a child of the 80's, I searched through Wikipedia entries on arcade games and the "Killer List Of Videogames" and compiled a list of games that could satisfy these criteria.

I played many of these games as a child, but for some reason, Q*bert really stood out to me. I used to play it a lot on our old Atari 2600, and even though (in retrospect) that ported version sucked when compared to the 1982 arcade version, I had instantly become addicted. My partner for the project agreed that it looked fun and promising, and the professor said it would work fine. Bingo!

So there was my obvious choice. Now, this is a game I could get excited about! Not only is Q*bert an easy game to convert to 3-D since by very nature its environment is a three-dimensionsal pyramid, but the playability of this arcade game was tried and tested almost 25 years ago. Now, on to the deeper research and analysis...

Digging For Buried Treasure

Delving deeper into the history and innards of Q*bert, I turned up lots of interesting information, foremost of which was the discovery of a Rules and User Guide, included here with some of my own modification and formatting. I also found some Arcade Game Photos. In addition, I found several interesting links:

Planning and Zoning

Our Project Proposal is already complete and approved, so at least we know the project's scope is feasible and acceptable. Our project will use OpenGL, be OS X-native, and be written in Objective-C. We've already worked out many details of representing game data, although we still have to decide how much modeling of characters to do, and how to go about building the environment.