Stendhal

What’s Stendhal:

Stendhal is an open-source “adventure game with an old-school feel.” It’s an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in which players are heroes and move around a diverse landscape of cities, forests and mountains fighting monsters as they go.

Graphically, it has the feel of the older Pokemon games I played when I was younger, giving it a nostalgic feel.

My involvement?

Rather than playing the game, Stendhal for me was a second-year group project I took part in at the University of Manchester. It involved debugging and fixing the large, open-source codebase used to run the game.

This had to be done in a reasonably short timeframe, with only one semester to get to know the game, make our changes and prove they worked successfully.

From a learning aspect, the primary goals of the course unit were to improve our ability to navigate work we’d not made personally, since this reflects many existing codebases in professional environments.

This was something I’d had prior experience doing in my year in industry, however, it was good to reinforce these skills in a new environment. Notably, there is more significance placed on test-driven development within this course, with marks being deduced if it wasn’t undertaken correctly.

Overall, this project helped improve my Java skills, but also how I can communicate concepts to other team members. As a group project, this played a large role in ensuring we performed well collectively. Ultimately we’d lose marks if any member didn’t contribute so organisation and ownership were vital.

In future, I’d like to continue working on open-source projects. Having experienced Stendhal, I understand how they can be rewarding, providing opportunities to consolidate technical understanding while contributing to a project that has a real-world impact.