Three Mercer University students went above and beyond for a technical communication project during fall semester. In just a week’s time, freshmen Ayush Sahoo, Jordi Riera and Liam Tarbell created a computer game for Hannah Nabi’s TCO 141: Intro to Professional Communication class.
Students in the course design a game and apply technical communication principles they have learned by writing step-by-step instructions on how to play the game. Groups have created card or board games in the past, but Sahoo, Riera and Tarbell are the first team to design a computer game.
“I’ve never had students create a video game, and I can’t quite believe that Ayush, Jordi and Liam were able to collaborate so effectively to design and develop an actual video game in about a week,” said Nabi, technical communication lecturer. “The quality of their work, from their excellent communication and collaboration to the impressive quality of their product — written instructions, graphics and game — speaks to the great things we can expect to see from them throughout their time at Mercer.”
The group set the bar — and their workload — high in choosing to create a computer game, but Riera said it was an opportunity to play into their individual strengths. Sahoo, a computer engineering major, handled the majority of the coding; Tarbell, also a computer engineering major, focused on the art, animations and design; and Riera, a mechanical engineering major, took the lead on writing the instructions and worked on some of the graphics.
“Essentially, we thought it would be more fulfilling and cooler in general to make a video game instead of a board game because no one has done it before,” Sahoo said.
The group’s game is called “Catana” — a play on the word katana, which is a Japanese sword — and features sword-fighting cats. On teams of up to three, the players set out to win the game by either collecting 10 balls of yarn or using their swords to eliminate the other players, Riera said. However, players can only collect yarn when they aren’t holding a sword, which takes some strategy.
“Catana” requires a gaming controller and is available for download here.
Sahoo used the Godot game engine to do the programming; Tarbell used OpenToonz platform for the animations; and Riera used Procreate for the graphics. Sahoo said the coding for the game was intensive, which helped him learn some better practices for programming in a crunch.
In addition to gaining technical writing skills that will apply to their careers, the students also took away some valuable lessons from their group work experience.
“This is the first time I’ve had a group where everyone actually pulled their weight. I think it’s going to help me with group work in the future and just classes in general,” Tarbell said. “It was also really cool seeing how other people work.”
Riera said it was rewarding to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time.
“It was fun to see everybody working with what they’re good at and being accountable and responsible with their work,” Riera said. “What we got from this is a group that we know works. We’ve talked about continuing doing games and stuff. We now have a group that we can rely on.”
