Illustration by Zohar Lazar Debugging knights and goblins were the last hurdle in the race to build an entire PC game in 4 days.
"Things are not so good today," sighs Benjamin Nitschke as he scrolls rough more than 15,000 lines of code. He and colleague Christoph Rienaecker have spent every waking moment of the past 56 hours staring at their monitors. The floor around them is littered with empty 2-liter bottles of 7Up and crumpled Slim Jim wrappers. It's early March, and the frantic, exhausted twentysomethings from Hanover, Germany, are at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Their task: to build a game from scratch in a mere four days.
Nitschke and Rienaecker are one of four teams participating in the XNA Game Studio Express Challenge, a Microsoft-sponsored effort to show how easy it is to build a PC game with the company's development tool, XNA Game Studio Express. Microsoft isn't declaring winners or bestowing medals — but clearly, there's some one-upmanship on tap. "We knew we wouldn't have time for really good gameplay, so we wanted to make something really impressive technically," Nitschke says.
The German designers chose to build an ambitious 3-D sword and sorcery title with extremely detailed graphics. Their game, DungeonQuest, looks impressive all right — as players creep through shadowy caves, their torches leave a smoke trail and reflect off the glistening walls.
In the last hour of the last day of the XNA challenge, Rienaecker finally finishes modeling and animating the ogre boss. But it's too soon to celebrate. "Where are all the monsters?" Nitschke mutters, looking for the game's villains, who have somehow disappeared. After a bit of spelunking through the code, they kill the niggling bug — a file-naming error — and upload their finished game. Then they stagger off to get drunk and catch up on their sleep.
Online Extras slideshow: DungeonQuest Development Screen by Screen download: Download DungeonQuest (40MB Zip File) more: Benjamin Nitschke's Blog
