UNNC students competed in the national game design competition

15 June 2023


Recently, the NetEase 2023 National Game Design Competition came to an end after the national finals, in which students from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) made history. The "Stool Dragon Studio" from UNNC outperformed more than 100 teams, successfully excelled in the national finals and won the National Best Popularity Award.

Worth mentioning is that the “Stool Dragon Studio” team included team members from three faculties. Yufeng Lu, who is responsible for planning the game, is a student from the School of Education and English. Xinlei Wen, Shujun Jiang, Luhui Zhou, Fan Zhang, Jinyang Zhang, five students from Computer Science programme, developed the game. Another two students, Fucheng Jin from International Business and German and Haitian Liu from International Communications Studies, work in the team for marketing and business development.

The competition was organised by NetEase Games Thunder Fire. The NetEase National Game Design Competition attracts many teams every year and has great influence nationwide. Teams are required to create a game based on the theme of their work within a month. The judging panel will determine the final score based on core experience, technical implementation, artistic expression, and innovation of the game.

It is a big challenge for students to build a team, plan and design a game in such a short time. Luhui Zhou, a third year student of Computer Science mentioned that they even learned the game engine from scratch themselves. “We had learned Java and basic software engineering skills before in a third year’s module. When we got to know that we need to learn Unity, we were really excited. Thanks to Dr Boon Giin Lee, he gave us some suggestions in terms of the strategy of this game.”

Omni has two factors: jumping and solving puzzles. Gamers play a micro creature called Omni and solve problems by using the features of Omni. In the current version, Omni can use parts of its body to help its movements. Based on this feature, the team has made many interactive designs.

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Yufeng Lu said “We met many difficulties during the design process. Our teammates made a lot of efforts to make it look authentic in the real world.” Xinlei Wen, a Year 4 Computer Science student added, “Some functions and mechanisms we may find intuitively in the real world, but it is not easy to realise them in the game. We put a lot of attention into finalising all these details.” Xinlei is going to pursue his master’s study of computing at the National University of Australia.

The Faculty has been investing in the FoSE Innovation Lab, which was established to nurture the creativity and originality among science and engineering students at UNNC. The FoSE innovation lab aims to be the forerunner of technology innovation to support holistic education and enhance student learning and campus experience. The Faculty intends to help students with innovative ideas embark on curiosity-based research commercialised through the Incubator Park or spinoff companies.