I am a student studying Computer Games Technology, which aims to teach C++ with comp sci topics and apply them to developing game engines.
I am entering my fourth and final year and have to pick a topic for my honours project, which is a year long project that requires a project to implement and a dissertation report to accompany it.
I would like to see if I can gain advice from others on the ideas I have came up with:
- Vehicle Physics Engine - modelling features of land vehicles such as acceleration, torque, braking, suspension, weight etc and allowing it to be configured depending on the type of vehicle
- Networking - creating a networked game and artificially connecting a large number of clients to study how the traffic should be managed. (I like MMORPGs and am interested to see how thousands of players are managed)
- Cross-platform framework - Creating a framework and game to go along with it to allow me to create cross-platform games without the need for popular middleware. I would create this using C++ and OpenGL.
- Big Data - I know this is a buzz area in computing just now, I wonder if anyone knows if it is used in the games industry at all?I had a suggestion from a lecturer to undertake a study on a popular game engine to see what benefits are gained from using it, what features it might be lacking and building on top of it. This interests me as I can get access to the source code for UE4 and as I am comfortable with C++, it would be a challenge to try to add a plugin and submit a pull request to Epic's repo.
- Creating a game and reporting on the design, market research, development and publishing of it? So in a year create a simple game and get it on a store at the end and talking about how the whole thing was done? I have already published a game on Android and Windows 8 where I created the game for a Microsoft sponsored Windows 8 game jam and won a few awards and got an interview posted on sites like MSDN.
I look forward to hearing people's thoughts and suggestions. Thanks in advance for any comments.