Franklin Regional students Augusto Butkewitsch and Jacob Toniolo can add three more words to their word-based video game — “Pennsylvania,” “state” and “champions.”
The seniors from Murrysville came out on top in the computer games and simulation programs category at the statewide high school competition organized by the Future Business Leaders of America after creating “KeyCoder,” a series of five word games. They will now take their game to the national competition next month.
Butkewitsch, 17, competed in the same category last year.
“The theme last year was an ’80s-based video game, and I really liked that the video game category was really a blank slate. It was great to be able to take so many creative liberties,” he said.
Butkewitsch has also taken coding classes at Franklin Regional Senior High School, and computers in one of his classrooms have access to the Unity game engine software, which he and Toniolo used to design “KeyCoder.”
“He could do a lot of the coding, and I was able to do the art,” Toniolo said. “I’ve taken engineering classes here where we designed 3D models, and that was a big help in designing a 3D environment for the game.”
“KeyCoder” even incorporates a little of last year’s ’80s theme.
“We designed it as a person playing the five different games in an ’80s-style work office,” Butkewitsch said.
The games in “KeyCoder” include one very similar to the popular New York Times game Wordle; a version of the classic “hangman” letter/word-guessing game, two games called “decipher” where players can choose to try and translate words spoken with a phonetic alphabet, or with Morse code; and fifth game where players receive a definition and must guess the word.
Toniolo said he drew on not only his engineering classes, but also his English classes.
“We had to give a seven minute presentation at the national competition,” he said. “My English classes definitely helped me.”
The national competition will take place during the FBLA’s annual National Leadership Conference, held June 22-30 in Atlanta.
