An Indian student wins Apple’s game coding competition

Sabesh Bharathi of SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, became the winner of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2021 challenge. The second-year Information Technology student competed with 350 coders from 35 countries. Until 2019, winning meant a ticket to the WWDC conference at Apple Park, Cupertino, California. But Covid-19 forced WWDC to go virtual. The Swift Student Challenge 2021 winners got WWDC merchandise, and most importantly for Sabesh, a year-long membership to the Apple Developer Programme.  

What was Sabesh’s game about? 
Sabesh’s game is called Ruby's Dilemma. Ruby is a timid rabbit being chased around by an evil monster, who keeps leading her into a labyrinth. There are dangers like volcanoes exploding in the background, which turn out to be factories belching smoke. But who is the monster? Sabesh has been quoted saying, "The monster who was chasing Ruby is actually a human being, that's the grand reveal. It's in level four that Ruby realises that the root cause of all pollution and climate crisis has been humans.” Engrossed in trying to save Ruby, players end up learning more about the role played by humans in damaging, and also, saving the environment. A youth with an environment conscious mind, Sabesh was keen on creating awareness around the global climate crisis and pollution. He feels that though the young activists are speaking bout it, a general discourse about the topic needs to created. To make it more appealing to kids, the target users, Sabesh used AR.  

What did Sabesh use to make the game?  
Part of the background music was done using the GarageBand app on iOS. The competition required him to use Swift Playgrounds (an app on iPad that enables coding in the Swift programming language) to create a game around a theme that he felt strongly about. He started working on Augmented Reality (AR) well in advance. He made the game more magical by building in a camera-enabled environment at a level. Here the user can open the camera to project the game’s maze on to the floor or bed of their room, bringing Ruby’s world to life, virtually.  

After his big win, armed with an Apple developer's license for a year, Sabesh plans to work on more iOS apps a mini Wikipedia on an animated science fiction series.