Their practised hands fly over the keyboard with agility and precision, as they try to identify and fix bugs in their codes. Hunched over their laptops, with the ubiquitous specs hanging carelessly over their nose and dishevelled hair, the coders hurry to fix bugs in their game before the event starts.
“There’s no end to debugging. I debug the whole code by going through line by line but the very next day, there seems to be something wrong. But, when you manage to get the whole code right, then there is a huge satisfaction,” says M. Upendra, a coder and a fourth year Computer Science B.Tech student from T.K. R. Engineering College.
Along with two other fourth year engineering students, Upendra has formed ‘Team Agile’, dedicated to develop games for smartphones across all platforms including Apple, Android, Blackberry and Windows. “We already have ‘Punch Me’ game in the Windows Marketplace.
The game has registered 2,000 downloads in the Windows platform,” said Sai Kiran Ratan and Sarnath, the two other members of the team.
Close to 50 such developers, all final year engineering students, participated in the ‘BlackBerry Got Game port-a-thon’ event here on Wednesday. The event was aimed at giving young coders an opportunity to launch their games for BlackBerry 10, the yet to be launched mobile operating system of BlackBerry.
New tricks
“I participate in such events to improve my skills, learn new tricks to monetise ideas and interact with a wide variety of coders. I have also attended a similar event in Bangalore,” says final-year engineering student from Shasthra University, Sanyam Jain, who already has developed four games in Windows, two in BlackBerry and one in Android platforms.
During the event, developers from BlackBerry guided the young coders in working on the new and upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform. “We have extensively worked on Windows and Android platforms. So, this event is a learning experience for us,” say Venkatesh, Nagarjuna and Syed Kalam from CREC Engineering College, Tirupati. The trio have developed six games based on Windows platform and are currently working on BB 10 platform.
