Students invent an endless runner game

Four second-year students of Vega School are well on their way to pursuing lucrative careers in the gaming world, after having their game, Neon Runner, successfully published on Google Play Store.

Two of the students reside in Sandton and were excited to share their journey with Sandton Chronicle.

Second-year IIE BCIS in Game Design and Development students, Peter van der Merwe (21) and Dylan Mitchell (20) created the game together with Dylan Ramsden and Damian Dowie after they were given an assignment to create an endless runner game. The four formed a team called Project Pixel and combined their talents to create Neon Runner which was successfully published on Google Play Store on 25 April.

They admitted it was not an easy journey. “The two major challenges I can think of that we faced during the three days of development was finding out how to run advertisements on our game,” said Van der Merwe.

“As well as finding out how to save player data as we didn’t want a player to lose their high score whenever they closed the app.”

Mitchell added that designing the game for mobile phones was a battle of trying to keep things low performance so that people with ordinary smartphones could play the game without graphics being a problem while making sure that the aesthetic appeal of the game was not being compromised.

Neon Runner is an endless runner game that becomes more challenging as it progresses. Players simply need to avoid the obstacles in their paths to keep moving forward and to score points as well as ‘currency’ in the game based on how far they progress, allowing them to purchase items such as character skins (alternate artwork or outfit that you can use to customise your character’s appearance), and more.

The students were pleased with how it all turned out.

“It’s a scary thought knowing your work is out there available for anyone on the planet to download, play and judge. But seeing so many people download and enjoy the app is honestly the best feeling in the world and is the reason why we do this,” said Van der Merwe.

Neon Runner is available to download for free from the Android app store. The app is currently only available on Android, but the team is investigating ways to get it onto the Apple app store too in the coming months.

“The four of us are definitely planning on starting up our own independent game development studio, which will be called Project Pixel. We will continue to update Neon Runner if there are any issues or bugs with the game, and we’re also planning on developing other games for the future,” concluded Van der Merwe.

Related article:

https://www.citizen.co.za/sandton-chronicle/223867/bryneven-primary-school-learner-blows-away-teacher-with-his-coding-skills/