In a world where innovation and disruption reign, MassDIGI is a key player. That was underscored today by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce when it presented MassDiGI and executive director Tim Loew with a Game Changer Award.
“MassDiGI has played a major role in the growth of the digital gaming sector in the region and continues to shape the economic landscape of Worcester and Central Massachusetts in a positive and significant way,” said Tim Murray, Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce president. “The Chamber is pleased to recognize MassDiGI for their game changing contribution to the region.”
The award, presented during the Chamber’s annual Game Changers Business Conference and Expo in Worcester’s Mechanics Hall, recognizes the most innovative companies, colleges and start-ups that are transforming and supporting the region’s economy. This year’s theme was the innovation economy and start-ups.
MassDiGI’s Executive Director Tim Loew and Managing Director Monty Sharma were on hand to receive the award.
“We are really proud of the work we do with the many students that we engage with across institutions in the region, the start-ups that we work with, and the communities”, said Tim Loew, MassDiGI’s executive director. “We feel really lucky to have been able to do this in Worcester, and at Becker.”
Also present at this morning’s event was Becker president and MassDiGI advisory board chair Nancy P. Crimmin, Alan Ritacco, dean of the school Design and Technology, and students from MassDiGI’s Live Studio course.
Tim Mammen of IPG Photonics and Shahbaz Soofi of WooRides also received Game Changer awards.
Read more about the award in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette here.
*The original version of this post can be found on becker.edu.
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In a world where innovation and disruption reign, MassDIGI is a key player. That was underscored today by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce when it presented MassDiGI with a Game Changer Award.
“MassDiGI has played a major role in the growth of the digital gaming sector in the region and continues to shape the economic landscape of Worcester and Central Massachusetts in a positive and significant way,” said Tim Murray, Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce president. “The Chamber is pleased to recognize MassDiGI for their game changing contribution to the region.”
The award, presented during the Chamber’s annual Game Changers Business Conference and Expo in Worcester’s Mechanics Hall, recognizes the most innovative companies, colleges and start-ups that are transforming and supporting the region’s economy. This year’s theme was the innovation economy and start-ups.
MassDiGI’s Executive Director Tim Loew and Managing Director Monty Sharma were on hand to receive the award.
“We are really proud of the work we do with the many students that we engage with across institutions in the region, the start-ups that we work with, and the communities”, said Tim Loew, MassDiGI’s executive director. “We feel really lucky to have been able to do this in Worcester, and at Becker.”
Also present at this morning’s event was Becker president and MassDiGI advisory board chair Nancy P. Crimmin, Alan Ritacco, dean of the school Design and Technology, and students from MassDiGI’s Live Studio course.
Tim Mammen of IPG Photonics and Shahbaz Soofi of WooRides also received Game Changer awards.
Read more about the award in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette here.
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Drop by our table at the Innovation Showcase. Click here for tickets and more information about Game Changers.
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New England collegiate esports survey
By Tim Loew, executive director, MassDiGI
Over the past year we’ve fielded more and more inquiries about the current state of collegiate esports in Massachusetts and across New England. Though we have some limited information, we thought it’d be a good idea to put out a survey to gain a little better insight into esports on campuses in the region. A link to the survey can be found here (or pasted below).
Please feel free to share the survey with colleagues or friends as you see fit. General results will be aggregated and shared later in the year.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVrvMh5TyI0TdOA-O7zmeEqKmrkwga2xNhnuJcnyK6DeMb2g/viewform.
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Play games with us at BostonFIG! We’ll be upstairs at table Y7. Registration information here.
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Join MassDiGI’s Tim Loew at the WCTI Developer’s Roundtable. Registration info here.
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Conformity vs. experience in the game development process
By Abdelaziz Ben Yahia, WPI ’18, Fulbright
Game design is heavily dependent on players’ feedback. A team of game developers is pretty tied to their own ideas and creations. Often, developers won’t conform to the rest and will not miss a chance to debate if something doesn’t go along with their beliefs or way of thinking.
However, we will make edits if 1 in 3 testers don’t like our product, even though it does hurt to see your hard work not liked but everyone that tried it.
Now imagine if a tester with 5 + years of experience, gives you negative feedback that contradicts with all the information you collected from all the other players.
Well, what you do, is apply the tips and tricks of the experienced tester.
Playtesting Leap A Head
They are the one that created so many games, tested hundreds for other developers and faced tough challenges doing so. Their advice is trustworthy and worth the risk.
After going through all these steps, you feel that you are totally in a state of “cognitive dissonance” with inconsistent thoughts.
But you should rest assured, if you listen to Bill Gardner from The Deep End Games talk. You must remember “You are going to be wrong … and it’s okay!” The man is the creative director on Perception!
Writing guidelines for our next fellows of MassDigi’s Live Studio is a responsibility.
They will learn from our mistakes and pass on the legacy. Our team’s game Leap A Head is the fruit of 3 months of hard work and teamwork too! Every member contributed with their skills and excellent mindset and we believe the MassDigi’s next generation will make the product even better.
Ultimately, I would say that feedback gave us that confidence and feeling of having people saying Go ahead we got your back! it helped us aim all our effort in the right path, as I once heard a producer from Harmonix say “velocity doesn’t mean closure,” since then, every game or project proved it again .
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Drop by WHM on Free Fun Friday and play our games! Free and open to the public. Info here.
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Making fun
By Ellen Chen, RIT ’18
“When you start the production process, you should be ready to throw everything away and start fresh,” Walt Yarbrough, SIP’s producer, told us as we we worked towards the end of pre-production sometime in early June. Over the first few weeks of SIP, we interns worked as quickly as we could to come up with the core designs for our games and create a working prototype. My team – Emmanuel Mallea and Tung Thanh Vu from Becker College, Dean Faulkner from LYIT (in Ireland), Jenny Sun from RISD, Emily Ramirez from MIT, Lisa Jeong from Berklee, and me – went through a very tense and stressful production. Our game, Little Grimm, is a cute and spooky take on Snake. However, it went through many iterations and design changes before we settled on its current iteration. Although we kept its core concept as a Snake game, many ideas were thrown out in the process, and it wasn’t easy as one might think.
One of the early prototypes of Little Grimm
Looking back, we have deviated greatly from our original ideas. Our game originally would’ve been a Snake game with a colorful twist. The snake would’ve had a multicolored body, and the player would be able to pass over a part of their tail if its color matches the head’s. We all thought it was a great idea and everyone made exciting concepts and prototypes, but none of us could really decide on what was more appealing. We had so many game mechanics flying around that it was hard not to add new ideas into the half-finished prototype. A few of them were almost hard to let go, even though they were impossible to implement and we didn’t have much time.
It wasn’t until we began playtesting that we realize the real issue: our game wasn’t fun. The feedback we received pointed out the flaws in the gameplay and the mechanics and how boring and confusing they respectively were to the playtesters. We were so caught up with our conflicting ideas that we’d ignored the importance of making our game fun. After Monty Sharma, SIP’s manager director, told us to stop adding more content and focus on what we had now, we got together to sort out everything. Using the feedback from playtesters and other interns, we threw out mechanics and ideas that were too confusing or vague or were sitting on the backburner for a long time. We discussed every issue that was holding us back from getting work done and how to resolve them. We then immediately focused on improving and changing what we didn’t threw out from the game. We were then finally able to produce a working prototype (just in time for production!).
Gameplay of Little Grimm
Once we were greenlit for production, we axed everything without difficulty and rebuilt the game in a much clearer direction. Once again, we ran into the same issue of falling in love with new mechanics, but this time we focused more on making fun instead of making content. We made changes to our current mechanics and improved gameplay based on feedback from more playtesting. We also held team meetings more frequently, making it easier to talk about which mechanic or idea to keep or cut out. As a result, we were able to work faster and more productively than we were in pre-production. With 2 weeks left, we’ve come a long way from where we started 2 months ago.
The entire project has been a stressful and bumpy ride, but there was much to get out of it. For instance, not every idea will make it into the game, and getting too attached to them or trying to cram them in at the last minute will cause more conflicts than progress. Teamwork is very important in the game design process, and conflicts of interests can erupt and break it apart if left unchecked. Furthermore, I can’t stress enough how very helpful playtesting can be; it helps give insight on what you’re doing wrong and what needs fixing and, most importantly, if the game is fun. Last but not least, be sure to have fun with your work! It’ll definitely help you and your team go a long way with game design.
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Balancing act
By Amanda Stockman, Becker College ’18
Perspective is a huge part of game development that many developers never speak enough of. Experienced industry veterans always harp on playtesting for the sake of learning the player behavior, studying how they play, and what decisions encourage them to spend money or continue playing. However, playtesting can give you honest feedback on how to operate in your own team and which tasks you should take. Receiving feedback is crucial in the way of ensuring which tasks get pushed to a higher priority to ensure you are on route to finishing your game.
My role on the endless runner project, Hyper Thunder Run: 198X, is a mash of 3D art and UI/UX. As our game is difficult to balance for polycount and optimization, I’ve had times where I’d have large tasks set aside just to tackle large goals such as “creating consistent fake lighting”, “rebalance spacing between when the skyscrapers respawn”, or “reduce all textures to less than 512 px” in the entire project. Unlike my time spent in academia, I finally understand the point of stepping away from a project to gain perspective.
Playtesting HTR 198X
Juggling two vastly different art roles, I needed to learn how to step back and worry less about the nitty gritty on a project. When I was worried about the framerate being a “future problem”, I was neglecting my UI/UX tasks, believing that they were a lesser priority. When several summer camps of students stopped by this past Tuesday, their brutal honesty on the neglect in the UI was an eye-opening experience that helped me realize how much of a higher priority task they were. Almost immediately after the event, I walked up to the Kanban board for my team and created a series of tasks to develop several menus for the game. The screen flow was already created and defined nearly a month ago but, since then, I was swamped with 3D tasks that I only made small, minute tasks for UI. With those two art positions in juxtaposition to each other, I’ve started to learn the fine balance between the two while working in an indie setting.
With only about three more weeks of SIP, I’m happy that I finally started to balance multiple roles in a team. The situation I faced can apply to almost every individual in the Summer Innovation Program: stepping back can provide the insight needed to learn what you truly need to work on in your game.
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