“Whether it’s the Starship Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon, many of us have long dreamt of piloting a spaceship.
Now, thanks to a team of college students, that dream can now become a reality — or more like a virtual reality nightmare.
“Intern Astronaut,” created by Broken Door Studio, a five-student team from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, won the grand prize at the fifth annual Massachusetts Digital Games Institute Game Challenge pitch contest held over the weekend.”
Virtual reality game Intern Astronaut takes grand prize in fifth annual MassDiGI Game Challenge pitch contest
Above: L to R – Broken Door Studio’s Kedong Ma, Yingying Chen, Shane Stenson, Sean Halloran, Jake Hawes and MassDiGI’s Monty Sharma
Cambridge, MA – February 29, 2016 – Intern Astronaut by Broken Door Studio, a team of students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), won the grand prize in the fifth annual Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI) Game Challenge pitch contest this weekend.
Intern Astronaut is a virtual reality game that takes on-the-job training to new heights. Made for Gear VR, Intern Astronaut is an immersive and funny game that enrolls the player as an intern tasked to fly a spaceship.
Taking on the role of an untrained intern in the game, players must watch their spaceship’s monitors for urgent instructions from mission control on what to do to keep their ship flying. Any instruction completed incorrectly or not quickly enough will damage their ship until their internship ends with them stranded in space! Every time players start the game their ship is equipped with different control panels and they are given new instructions on how to pilot it, ensuring that every playthrough is as challenging as the first day on the job.
Broken Door Studio, which also won the College Beta/Near Release category, is made up of Sean Halloran, Yingying Chen, Shane Stenson, Kedong Ma and Jake Hawes. The game will be released for Gear VR in late spring 2016.
“Our team is thrilled to have won the Game Challenge. It was a great event for all of us,” said Sean Halloran, the team’s programmer. “We got terrific feedback from so many amazing mentors and judges. We learned so much. Everyone making games should go to it.”
The MassDiGI Game Challenge helps indie, startup and student game developers and entrepreneurs shape their ideas and products for launch. This year 35 teams from across the northeast competed in front of a packed room at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Kendall Square.
Since the MassDiGI Game Challenge began five years ago, over 175 different teams from around New England and beyond have pitched games and taken home prizes valued at over $100,000. Top past winners include titles such as PWN, Catlateral Damage, Depression Quest, Pathogen, Wobbles and Starlot Derby.
Above: L to R – Competitor Chaima Jemmali meets with mentor Wizdy’s Nikita Virani
The annual event is a showcase for the expanding game development cluster in the region. Over the event’s two days, dozens of game industry veterans served as speakers, mentors and judges.
As the Grand Prize and College Beta/Near Release Category winner Broken Door Studio won cash, legal services from Greenberg Traurig, computer hardware and game merchandise valued at over $7,500.
“This year’s contest was the closest competition ever,” said Monty Sharma, managing director of MassDiGI, “We were really impressed by the teams, their creativity and skills. Each year we see improvements in the games and in their market potential.”
Other top winners include Worcester-based Zephyr Workshop which won the People’s Choice Award as well as the Indie Demo/Alpha Category for Florafiora, a game they are making in collaboration with Mob Made Games of Cambridge.
“Winning not only our category but the People’s Choice Award is rewarding and humbling,” said Breeze Grigas, Zephyr Workshop’s Co-Founder and Designer. “We’ve been coming to the Game Challenge for five years, each time we get better and this year it really paid off for Florafiora.”
Florafiora is a single-player experience where you help planetoid-dwelling “Seedizens” explore and expand their tiny universe, meeting other cultures and keeping everyone happy and productive.
“With so many exciting games from indies and students in the competition, it was a challenge to make a decision,” said Caroline Murphy, CEO of the Boston Festival of Indie Games, one of the contest’s judges. “To me, just entering the MassDiGI Game Challenge shows a commitment to creating games that speaks to success.”
The other top Indie winner was Jig Time which won top honors in the Beta/Near Release Category. Jig Time is a fun, new photo-sharing app – like Snapchat but with more game elements – that allows users to exchange their images in the form of interactive jigsaw puzzles.
I++, another team of WPI students, won the Serious Game Category with Chinmoku, a mystery game which seeks to teach the player hiragana, one of the Japanese writing systems, through immersive gameplay.
Serious Game Category runner-up honors went to EduSaga, a team from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, with their eponymous Chinese language-learning detective game.
Heist Night, made by yet another team of WPI students, won the College Demo/Alpha Category.
Winning the High School Category was PolyThief made by Nostradingus, a team of students from Millbury (MA) Memorial Jr./Sr. High School.
“We met these students three years ago. Since then their teacher has given them encouragement and brought them to the Game Challenge each year. The students have learned from mentors and from each other how to build an award-winning game,” said Sharma. “It’s great to see.”
Runner-up in the High School Category from Westborough High School was Hoksy with Shelter Shock.
Other Category Runner-up honors went to:
Indie Demo/Alpha: Petricore Games with Traveling Merchant
Indie Beta/Near Release: Copper Frog Games with Tattoo! A Game of Ink
College Demo/Alpha: Omnitone Games from Becker College with HotWired
College Beta/Near Release: French Frogs from Becker with Make Bonds Now and Jeremy Slavitz from Tufts University with Metamorphic
Honorable Mentions were given to:
Indie Demo/Alpha: BareHand with Big Boi Little Boi
College Demo/Alpha: MOTU from Fitchburg State University, Revolver: Rebound from WPI, Convergence from Becker and The Experiment from the Five College Consortium
College Beta/Near Release: Lily Leap from Becker
Indie and College Category winners also received prizes including cash and legal services from Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton valued at $1,000. The event is supported by MassDiGI’s annual sponsors and hosted by Microsoft New England Research & Development.
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About the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI)
MassDiGI is the statewide center for entrepreneurship, academic cooperation and economic development across the games ecosystem. MassDiGI’s many programs and activities support business growth and enhance the talent pipeline between higher education and the game industry.
For more information about MassDiGI, please visit massdigi.org or follow them on Twitter @mass_digi.
Winner – The Sunshine Committee with “Heist Night” Runner-up – Nick West with “HotWired”
Finalists – Nick West’s Omnitone Games with “HotWired” (Becker College) and The Sunshine Committee – Tom Farro, Kelly Zhang, John Guerra, Benny Peake & Dillon DeSimone “Heist Night” (WPI)
Winner – Broken Door Studio – Sean Halloran, Shane Stenson, Yingying Chen, Jake Hawes and Kedong Ma with “Intern Astronaut” Runner-up1 – French Frogs – Samuel and Tristan Charron with “Make Bonds Now” Runner-up2 – Jeremy Slavitz with “Metamorphic“
Finalists – Broken Door Studios (WPI), Metamorphic (Tufts University) and French Frogs (Becker)
Honorable Mention – Lily Leap (Becker)
College & Indie Serious
Winner – i++ – Francesca Carletto-Leon, Dillon DeSimone, Sam Wallach and Robert McKenna with “Chinmoku” Runner-up – Jeffrey King, Katie McDonald and Melissa Cochran with “EduSaga“
Finalists – EduSaga (Harvard University Graduate School of Education) and i++ (WPI)
High School
Winner – Nostradingus with “PolyThief” Runner-up Hoksy with “Shelter Shock”
Finalists – Hoksy (Westborough) and Nostradingus (Millbury)
For MassDiGI, 2016 is already shaping up to be one of our most action-packed years yet. In addition to our annual programs, events and activities around the Game Challenge, GDC, PAX East and SIP*, we have a stack of special projects in the pipeline along with a couple of games to launch. Phew!
That said, we’d like your help in spreading the word regarding a final push on our MA game industry survey. If you’d be so kind as to share it across your channels be it social media, email etc. and ask folks to fill it out, we’d be very grateful. The survey itself takes just a minute or two and the aggregated (and anonymized) data we get from it is very helpful to us when working with government etc. This link goes directly to it: www.massdigi.org/survey.
This year, the survey is a collaborative effort that we are doing with UMass Boston and the UMass Donahue Institute through Prof. Pacey Foster. Once the quantitative piece is complete Prof. Foster and UMass graduate student Brad Bleidt also plan on doing a few interviews with some community leaders and developers. We are already looking forward to sharing the results with everyone in late April or early May.
Lastly, we’re working with the folks at the SHiP iT! Game Jam in Montreal. If you or anyone you know might be interesting in jamming on a ship in the St. Lawrence in late May. Drop us a line. We have made arrangements with the organizers regarding tickets (including, potentially discounted spots for students). Should be an amazing time. Check out their video below.*
Hibachi Hero, a free, fun and fast-paced first person food shooter released today on the App Store, came from the imaginations of talented MassDiGI SIP interns Sai Timmermann from IUPUI, Melissa Chiu from RIT, Chris Bruno from Becker College, Mackenzie Denker from Northeastern, Uyen Uong from RPI, Rejon Taylor-Foster from Becker and Alex Ripple from Berklee who all teamed up to bring the game to life.
Working together this past summer, the team, using Unity, produced a great game (watch the trailer here) which caught the eye of our New York City-based game publisher partner, Thumbspire. From there, in coordination with Thumbspire, we brought Hibachi Hero into our LiveCode Studio program at Becker during the fall 2015 semester. Through LiveCode, more students from Becker as well as other schools had roles in the further development of the game and getting it ready to ship.
This fall, the LiveCode launch team, a group of students from across a range disciplines, put the final touches on Hibachi Hero and it is now available to download for iOS (coming soon for Android on Google Play – stay tuned).
It has been a busy semester for the launch team which pushed out Limbs (Google Play, App Store), a SIP14 and LiveCode 14/15 & 15/16 title, in October and, working with Thumbspire, launched Midnight Terrors (Google Play, App Store), also a SIP14 and LiveCode 14/15 & 15/16 title, which hit the stores earlier this month.
Note: Read other launch stories from the Worcester Telegram here, AdWeek’s SocialTimes here, The Patriot Ledger here and MassLive here.
We will be at GDC from March 14-17. If you wish to schedule a meeting, please drop us a line. Or, drop by and say hello during the day on March 14-15 at the Open Gaming Alliance Biz Exchange, SF Green Space @ EEFG, 657 Mission Street. In addition, we are hosting our annual early evening Made in MA at GDC Party on March 14. RSVP here. Ping us for a code!
Made in MA at GDC is sponsored by Vivox, Thumbspire, Petricore Games, emojiTap, Pileated Pictures, HappyGiant & Becker College
Mr. Stricker will speak about the video games and the many ways that making them can be so different than playing them. Read more about Disco Pixel here.
This talk is co-sponsored by MassDiGI. RSVP to lectures(at)becker.edu. Free and open to the public.
Location: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Room 210, 61 Sever St., Worcester
Ready Player One: Opportunities in the Growing Video Game Industry
Michael Gallagher, President & CEO, Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
– Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 6:00 p.m. –
Mr. Gallagher will speak about the expanding roles of games and the game industry in the context of their economic, social and cultural impact. Click here for his bio.
With a special introduction by U.S. Representative James P. McGovern
This talk is co-sponsored by MassDiGI. RSVP to lectures(at)becker.edu. Free and open to the public.
Location: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Room 210, 61 Sever St., Worcester
chi Hero
We will be at GDC from March 14-17. If you wish to schedule a meeting, please drop us a line. Or, drop by and say hello during the day on March 14-15 at the 
Mr. Stricker will speak about the video games and the many ways that making them can be so different than playing them. Read more about Disco Pixel 
Mr. Gallagher will speak about the expanding roles of games and the game industry in the context of their economic, social and cultural impact. Click 
