SIGBOVIK 2009 Recap, Featuring Arkan∞id

As SIGBOVIK 2009 comes to its glorious conclusion, it's time for me to reflect somewhat.

This year's events was quite successful, for a number of reasons. First, we were in Scaife Hall 125, this amazing conference room which is perfect for the event. I hope we continue to have it there. There were a number of great presentations. The proceedings (which can be purchased or viewed for free here) look amazing. But what's more, there was a great turn-out, and the days events proceeded very smoothly, with the one exception of my maybe having too much coffee. 

There were also a bunch of "real" projects that people spent their time on. For example, check out:

• Stacey, Mike, Carsten and Jeff in a Ghostbusters/Ghost Ride the Whip Parody.
• Tom7 had a MathMan parody (you know, from the TV show Square One) for teaching children about LF, LFMan, which you can really play.

And of course, there was my own work! I made a game called, Arkan∞id, the infinite brick-breaking game. (In the spirit of Breakout and Arkanoid.) You see, it's like a normal brick-breaking game, but it goes on forever! Some semi-clever engineering makes it so. Plus, it's a Blackberry game, so you can leave it running all the time! So, here's what you should do:

• Download the game! If you have a Blackberry, point it to http://a8.nelsbeckman.com/ so you can download and play! It looks and plays best on a Blackberry Pearl, but all platforms should work.
• Read the Paper.
• Check out my presentation.
• Watch Youtube Videos of the game here, here and here.
• Finally, if you are interested, the full source code is available on my Google Code project.

Oh, and one more thing: This research work is award winning! My paper won the 2009 award for "Most Pixels," which really I think I deserved. The award itself was a flash animation, which you can see here, and which itself won the people's choice award for best presentation!