The first choice (which is the more popular one) involve a
The second choice involve creating a parser to read a game script to customise certain aspects of a battle game (like the background, character avatars, name etc.) Although this is less popular compared to the first option, students who chose this option seemed to enjoy it more judging from their work. IMHO too, this project is more challenging and fun as the scripting language is much more complex and thus allowing students to be creative and to come up with various different solutions (I swear that there weren't any identical solutions at all!)
I have prepared various backgrounds (including those from my travels) and character avatars for them to play around with. Here is one example output which I've provided.
Surprisingly, many students were on a creative high and went crazy and provided their own (or rather, copyrighted) images!
Of course, images weren't the only things customisable. You can also customise various text in the game like dialogues, titles and names. Here's one example script which customises the start messages, victory messages and dying messages of the two characters (cute I would say...).
One group went even further and devised an epic "Battle of Lecturers" involving the new Faculty of Information Technology building as the backdrop, me (with the build of a Street Fighter character -.-||||) as the hero, and another lecturer as my mortal enemy (that's you, YP!! ^www^)
Here's the corresponding script for the output above.
Tough and Old lecturer!! ROFL!! o(^O^)o