Since 2007, the Oregon Game Project Challenge teaches middle and high school students in Oregon how to go from video game players, to developers in a year long competition. Every season a new theme is announced and competitors have the entire school year to develop a video game from start to finish, including coding, art and sound design. This year’s competition was in mid-May, and the team Toast Lads from Century High School won best in show for their game, MARK3T M3TAL. Jason Pelkey is their team lead and a senior at CHS. Andrew Scholer is the director of the Oregon Game Project Challenge. They join us to share more on this year’s competition.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For hundreds of Oregon middle and high schoolers, video games aren’t just something to play but something to create. Since 2007, the Oregon Game Project Challenge has brought together young people to develop games from start to finish, from concept and art and sound design to coding and debugging. They have an entire school year to complete their games. This year’s competition was held two weeks ago and for the second year in a row, a team from Hillsborough’s Century High School won Best in Show. Jason Pelkey is the team lead and a senior at Century High School. Andrew Scholer is the director of the Oregon Game Project Challenge. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Jason Pelkey: Thank you.
Andrew Scholer: Thank you.
Miller: Jason, first – how would you describe your winning game market medal?
Pelkey: Well, if I could describe it in my own words, it would be like a combination between all the games I’ve loved: Raft, Minecraft, Don’t Starve Together. I’ve taken elements from each one to combine it into one game, throw it on a train and then you get to explore. You go collect resources, get to research them, craft new things and just keep going like that until you reach self-sustainability, where you can survive entirely on your train.
Miller: Just cycling around on the train.
Pelkey: Yes.
Miller: Why a train? What interested you in getting some of these elements from games you’ve loved and that millions of people around the world have loved? But why put it on a train?
Pelkey: So this is something I really wanted to do for a long time, because the idea that you could have a movable base is such a novel concept for me. And a train is like the best thing you can do because you can add carts. It’s a pretty stable foundation to add stuff on, unlike a boat that’s more like you can go wherever you want or a house that’s completely stationary. You get to explore the world while building your base and I think that’s super cool.
Miller: Andrew, how does the Oregon Game Project Challenge work?
Scholer: So each year we announce a theme and that usually comes out in October, November. And we blast that out to all of the schools that might be interested in participating. And then, like you said, the students have the full academic year to work on their project. Then in usually mid-May is when we have the main event teams come in and basically, picture a giant science fair for video game projects. So teams will set up a booth and they’ll have their computer set up so people can try the games and play them, maybe a poster board set up, explaining their project. And then we bring in industry volunteers to serve as judges and go around interviewing each team. The teams get a chance to go out and play each other’s projects and that’s pretty much the event.
Miller: What are the judges looking for? I mean, what are the different qualities that games are judged on?
Scholer: There are five separate categories of judging and part of what we do when we release the theme at the start of the year, we also release an achievements guide. This is a list of within the five categories: programming, art and assets, theme and story, game design and project management. Within each of those five categories, there are a series of things we’re gonna be looking for. So maybe under project management, it is keeping meeting logs for your team. Each one of those achievements generally has multiple levels, so there’s kind of a basic level, an intermediate and advanced level. The judges use that rubric to do kind of the base evaluation and award each team points. That kind of sets the initial ranking for teams and then oftentimes, there’ll be multiple teams that max out a particular category. So then we have to send back judges and do a more subjective evaluation. But the teams kind of know at the start of the season what we’re looking for,
Miller: How long do the judges have to actually play these games? I mean, some games can take many, dozens of hours to master and to complete, but I don’t imagine that judges have time to do that for dozens of games.
Scholer: No, absolutely not. We bring in a lot of judges. This year we had nine judge teams and each judge team has five judges, one for each of the categories. So we bring in a lot of volunteers. There’s a lot of great people who are willing to come out and spend a Saturday to do this. Each judge team spends a half hour with each of the projects that they evaluate, so they do have a little bit of time to play the games and then talk to the teams.
Certainly, yeah, there are games that there’s no way that they’re gonna play through. One of the pieces of advice that experienced coaches often give their teams is to think of this as a design criteria. You’re designing for an audience, that the audience is people who are gonna roll up and need to be able to dive into your game within a few minutes. So a really involved role playing game is probably gonna be a hard sell.
Miller: Jason, in terms of the design, how much did the way the judging works affect the way you approached this? I mean, I imagine you had to kind of grab people quickly.
Pelkey: Yeah, that was something we were a little worried about, but we decided that it was more important that we just built our dream and tried to make it fit the achievements second. We actually came up with the idea for the game before the theme even got released and started working on it. And [we] were just hoping that it would match the theme.
Miller: The theme is cycles?
Pelkey: Yes.
Miller: OK. How is it that you then retroactively fit your game to the theme?
Pelkey: Well, we kind of built a skeleton of the game, because certain mechanics are gonna fit any theme. Like having a train, having procedural generation, we can sort of mold that how we want. And once the theme got released, we had a meeting, we’re like, how can we make this work? And we didn’t get many ideas at first, but over time, we kind of developed and filled in those cracks.
Miller: Let’s take a step back. How did you first get interested in making video games as opposed to just playing them?
Pelkey: Oh, I think I felt really trapped with the amount of games that I was able to play when I was really young. I think that I wanted to make games myself so that I could have the freedom to explore my own imagination. I was kind of stuck with Minecraft as my first game for years and with all these ideas running through my head, just being able to make them and play them myself sounded super fun.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of this project? And I should say again, you’re the team lead. So you’re in charge of this team of fellow students. How much collective work went into making this game?
Pelkey: Oh, gosh, I couldn’t give you a number but it’s a lot. We work an hour and a half for two days every week and I’ve spent probably just the same amount of time at school as at home. So it was a lot. In terms of art, specifically, it’s a lot of designing and coming up with ideas for coding. It’s mostly just debugging, I’ll be honest. But it’s a lot, it’s really a lot.
Miller: What was the most challenging part of creating this game for your team this year?
Pelkey: To be honest, out of everything, probably the sound. Because it’s something that none of us really looked deep into and to get actual decent sounds, and have them be original, it’s a lot harder than one might think.
Miller: How has this competition evolved over the years? Andrew Scholer, I mean, this is now the 17th year that it’s happened.
Scholer: So it started with, I think about 20 teams participated the first year. It used to be hosted at Chemeketa Community College and teams were scattered in various classrooms. It kind of existed in that form for a couple of years. And then at some point we decided we wanted to do the big science fair model. We wanted teams really getting out and seeing each other’s projects and getting to interact with each other. So we made that change back in about season eight, the first year we went to kind of the science fair model.
Over the years we’ve kind of iterated on what activities, what other things there are going on as the students are doing their thing. But it’s always been, the students are the star of the show. We’ve been pretty consistent with the judging model for a number of years now and we really think we’ve got something that works well. Our biggest concern at this point is just capacity. We were limited in the number of teams we could invite this year just based on the space available and the number of volunteers we can turn out.
Miller: Were you a gamer growing up?
Scholer: I was, yeah. A common refrain when I’m talking to volunteers and just asking why they came out and thanking them for being there is, “man, I wish that something like this had existed when I was a kid.” And that’s very much true of myself. I wanted this to exist for my kids. I’ve got two teenagers, one who’s in college now, one who’s in high school, who both participated for a couple of years. This was something I would have loved doing. I was always interested in systems of rules and making games, kind of pen and paper games and programming things.
Miller: Maybe you’re used to it at this point, but are you ever floored by the scale of the work and the sophistication of the work that these high school or maybe even middle school teams are doing?
Scholer: It is really incredible. Every year, there’s something, there’s multiple somethings that kind of blow us away. This year, I remember one of the judges coming back from lunch and joking with one of his partners on his judging team that the middle school team he had just looked at was using GitHub, this platform for collaborating on code projects, better than his team at work did. So there really are teams that just use this as an excuse to really dive in and do something incredible. That’s really why we do it and the opportunity we want to provide.
Miller: Jason, I mentioned that you’re the team lead. Does that mean that it’s up to you to sometimes tell fellow students or maybe friends what they have to do?
Pelkey: Yeah. Well, everyone could delegate their own work but at some point that gets super messy. So having a designated student lead who can make those final decisions, even if it is talking with the team first, it’s pretty important if we want to get a solid and unified front.
Miller: What do you think you’ve learned from taking part in this? And I should say that again this is your second year doing it, second year winning best in show. What do you think you’ve learned from this, in addition to video game specific skills?
Pelkey: Oh, there’s so much I want to talk about. Something I did learn is to make sure you’re organized, because every year we try super hard to make a Trello that will actually follow, but only a Trello that people will actually tune into does anything.
Miller: What is a Trello?
Pelkey: Oh, yeah. So a Trello is like an organization board where you can keep track of your tasks and what you’re doing, what you’ve finished. That can help organize what we’re working on at the moment and what we need to work on in the future.
Miller: So, in a sense, a big thing you’ve learned is how to manage a big project with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of people all contributing.
Pelkey: Yes, that’s a great way to say it.
Miller: Andrew, what is the gender breakdown like these days?
Scholer: So the gender breakdown’s been getting more and more even. I’m actually just pulling up the stats from this year – we had 285 total participating students and I am showing 117 of those identified as female, which is the largest. So that’s about 40%. That’s the largest representation we’ve had of female-identifying students. And just gaming in general has become a little bit less gendered than it was, say, 10 years ago, which I think has certainly helped attract a wider variety of students to this competition. That’s great to see because, certainly, at least in the programming area and obviously there’s lots of other skill sets involved, but my day job is computer science instructor. And I see the lack of diversity in that pipeline. So the fact that we are attracting a significant number of female students to explore something related to developing technology is really exciting.
Miller: Jason, what went through your mind when you heard that for the second year in a row, your team had won best in show?
Pelkey: I was immediately thinking like scholarships, school applications, it was too late for those things. I was thinking more towards work, like, oh my God, what can I say for this? I could say that I’ve done a pretty good job. That makes me happy.
Miller: Do you plan to go into video game design? Would you hope to do that as a career?
Pelkey: It sounds really fun. I’m more leaning towards cybersecurity but anything in comps, I’m totally content with.
Miller: Let’s say you do go into cybersecurity. Do you think you’ll continue to make games on the side? Is that even something that you could do or would you need a whole team doing all nighters to make games?
Pelkey: I could totally see myself doing that, actually. I might need to get a friend to do the art for me because I am not the best at that, but it would be a fun side project. I’ve heard stories about people who do that as a side job and eventually get rich because of it.
Miller: Andrew, there have been large layoffs in the gaming industry in recent years. In just the first couple of months of this year alone, something like 6,000 people who work making games lost their jobs. How much do you think about that, about industry
trends as you put this comp competition together?
Scholer: Yeah, I think there are massive problems in how the workforce is structured and treated in the game industry, but I don’t see our role as training students to become game developers, where certainly some of them have interest in exploring that as a career option. And I know when I talk to students about it, I kind of freely share the idea that they’re going to pay the artist tax. If you go into game development instead of some other kind of software, you’re gonna work harder for less money because it does seem so appealing to so many people.
But if the skills that they’re developing in these projects, both the technical skills and the project management and the working on teams, most of these students are not going to go into game development, but they’re hopefully going to be able to apply those skills to some aspect of what they do. In the same way that I think high school sports are great for students who aren’t going to go become professional athletes. Participating in OGPC I think is gonna be valuable to students regardless of what they go into. I just kind of feel that the part of it that is the dream of, “Oh, maybe I could go do this,” I don’t wanna absolutely dissuade that. But I think that I see that more as the motivating factor for putting in work and learning and developing these skills rather than the actual goal.
Miller: Jason, do you have an idea for the next game that you would love to make already?
Pelkey: Maybe like a procedurally generated dungeon crawler sort of thing. Where you go down, collect loot, come back up and trade it with a town. Just like a small little thing like that could be kind of fun.
Miller: All right. Jason Pelkey, the world will wait for that. Jason Pelkey and Andrew Scholer, thanks so much.
Scholer: Thank you.
Pelkey: All right.
Miller: Jason Pelkey was the team lead for Toast Lads. It’s the team that won Best in Show in the high school division and this year’s edition of the Oregon Game Project Challenge. Andrew Scholer is the director of the competition.
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