Video Game Design Crash Course

Video Game Design Crash Course
They could be doing a hundred other things during their time off from school this summer.

Instead, 22 Columbia teens are halfway through a two-week crash course on designing video games.

The students, from Richland 1, Richland 2 and Lexington-Richland 5, are participants in an experimental workshop at W.A. Perry Middle School sponsored by the Columbia Urban League.

While they get no academic credit for the activity, which runs six hours a day, it is a safe wager the teens will be the envy of computer-savvy peers when swapping summer vacation stories.

Each workshop participant will leave Friday with a personalized CD-ROM with a video game and computer animation they conceived and programmed from scratch.

"It's amazing how complicated these things are," said Patrick Herbert, a rising junior who attended Keenan High last year. "But I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. It's pretty cool."

Jimmie Thompson, a rising sophomore at Keenan, rolled his eyes in mock indignation and chided his friend for his plodding approach through a workbook detailing how games such as "Brix" and "Caves of Doom" are built.

"I'm starting to get pretty good at fixing my own problems," Thompson said.

The first assignment was creating a design for a screen saver, a program that displays an image when a computer is not in use.