Drop by our panel or visit our table (S64)! For more information on BostonFIG at MIT, please click here.
Panel Info:
When: 10:00am- 10:30/45am
Where: Classroom 2 – Stata Center Room 144
What: “Game Devs: The Next Generation”
Description: Games, the final frontier. These are the continuing tales of five college students. Their mission: to explore strange new titles, to seek out new genres and platforms, to boldly go where no one has gone before. In this episode, the young developers learn the black art of making a game over eleven weeks at MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program. Hear them tell the story of how they met their goals and overcoming giant bugs, terrifying teamwork, diabolical daily builds, stale pizza and zombies.
Featuring a conversation among MassDiGI SIP ’14 alumni Paige Coblentz (RISD), Andrew Krischer (Northeastern), Pat Roughan (WPI), Loren Sherman (MIT) and James Spavold (Becker College) along with MassDiGI’s, Tim Loew and Monty Sharma.
MassDiGI managing director Monty Sharma will deliver a keynote talk at this special LearnLaunch and GA event which brings thought leaders together to look at future trends in learning. Information here.
Worcester-area games students are welcome to attend. Learn all about our 2014-15 student-focused programs and activities. Free and open to all. This is event is co-sponsored by Becker IGDA.
When: September 5, 6:00p
Where: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Room 210, 61 Sever St., Worcester
The 2014 MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program Open House on August 7 featured four great games and attracted over 150 attendees. Read about the Open House here in Worcester Magazine, here in WPI’s Daily Herd or watch CharterTV3 WNT’s report below.
As game developers, we often tell ourselves stories when making games. Not the ones that you see in a script, but ones about the people who will play the game. “Okay, so this part will introduce the player to mazing, and then they use that to defeat the boss, and then they’ll feel awesome.” Every pixel, line of code, or variable changed all has a purpose, and we tell ourselves that the player will interact with it in a particular way and get a specific reaction out of it.
In reality, things aren’t that easy. Our stories about our games are often as fictional as the stories within them. That’s why we playtest. But playtesting isn’t an exact science; it’s often much more qualitative. And that’s good! There are a lot of changes that require qualitative feedback more than raw data. But there are also a lot of risks that come with it. We tend to gloss over feedback more easily. Every piece of info we receive gets contorted into our story. It’s all too easy to assume that the tester is an anomaly, that most players will play the game ‘properly.’
But with quantitative feedback collected from all players, the illusions disappear. It’s no longer, “I didn’t see the button,” but rather “Out of 100 players, 63 didn’t see the button.” Likewise, it’s no longer “This player just doesn’t understand,” instead “63 percent of players just don’t understand.” This summer, we’re using Splyt Analytics to help drive our decision making on Midnight Terrors. It’s hard to argue with the data, because data doesn’t tell a story. Data is the story.
That’s not to say data is infallible. It can be outdated or incomplete, and it can certainly be misinterpreted. But it can never be wrong. That’s because data is just what happened. It doesn’t carry any analysis of its own, it’s just a series of numbers and events.
In some ways, it’s a bit intimidating to use analytics. It’s effectively handing off your game, and letting whatever will happen, happen. You can’t coach people, and you can’t hide from the results. In some ways, it’s like launching a title (just with a quarter the stress). But it’s absolutely necessary, because polishing a game can’t just be an art. It needs to be an art and a science. And for that, we need data.
At this point it is safe to say that many people have played a match three game (cough, cough Candy Crush Saga), or a variant of the genre. Match three was the idea given to us to brainstorm about at the beginning of MassDiGI’s SIP, so we took it as far as we could. Starting with “we should throw ragdoll limbs at a wall; that could be fun”, and from then on that was the idea that we embraced. Eventually taking on a mad scientist feel and a more friendly robot zombie limb approach, after much debate, Limbs moved forward out of the planning phase.
Limbs features a little alien kid named LAK, but he has a few problems. He came to your planet to make some friends, but those friends eventually turned against him and you must protect him. Of course, you do this by throwing limbs at those that turn against LAK. Combat isn’t just simply matching three colors; you need to plan ahead for certain limb combinations that make combo creatures. Limbs tries to break the boring routine of match threes and offers interesting battle mechanics that effect the game board as a whole. Plus, throwing ragdoll limbs at an enemy is extremely satisfying.
The team that is making Limbs become reality consists of five students from five different colleges, and we had never met each other before this.
Renzo Heredia – Audio Engineer and Composer – from Berklee College
Andrew Krischer – Producer and Programmer – from Northeastern University
Sienna McDowell – 2D Artist – from WPI
Catherine Shen – Art Director, 2D Artist and UI Designer – from RISD
James Spavold – Lead Programmer and Build Manager – from Becker College
Working in the team has been a great experience for all of us. Personally, I have worked in a handful of teams in my college career, and they have been on both ends of the spectrum. This has definitely been the most motivated team I have ever been on. At first SIP’s eleven weeks seems like a large amount of time, then you start and get halfway through the process and it feels like no time is left. Even when our team hit that point, we didn’t lose much motivation, and this was the first time that one of my teams has powered through that.
It feels great to be working in this environment. Meeting my team, and also the other teams working alongside us, was a great opportunity. Not only to make games and extend your network, but also to make some great friends with similar interests and feelings towards games. With this great atmosphere, working forty hour weeks isn’t that bad at all. In fact coming into work feels great knowing that by the end we will have a fun and interesting game to show our friends, family, and future employers that we made start to finish.
By Pat Roughan, senior, WPI and Yuka Ninohira, junior, Becker College
Motion control technologies have fascinated and frustrated players and developers alike. They’re great when they work, but long or difficult gestures increase the chance of hardware losing track of the motion and players feeling cheated. When our team approached the Leap Motion, a USB infrared camera for PC and Mac that tracks hand and finger movement, we knew that whatever game we designed would have to feel natural for the player and work well with the device’s capabilities.
From that emerged the idea for Many Mini Things, a mini-game compilation game. In it, you’re standing at a capsule machine, popping in coins to get toys. To get the toy, however, you have to defeat the mini-game lurking inside each capsule. In order to win, you’ll have to move, spin, point, swipe, and grab through fast-paced games to attain sweet victory – or hilarious failure.
Many Mini Things is the product of a seven-person team from various colleges:
Pat Roughan, WPI – Producer & Artist
Yuka Ninohira, Becker College – Art Director & UI/UX Designer
Aaron Lin, Becker College – Lead Programmer
Owen West, WPI – Build Manager & Programmer
Oliver Awat, Becker College – Level Designer & Unity Programmer
Hannah Klales, Smith College – Level Designer & Unity Programmer
Renzo Heredia, Berklee College of Music – Composer & Sound Designer
The idea for Many Mini Things started with us MassDiGI SIP interns being greedy, wanting to have a bunch of different ideas as the final game we were going to pitch at the end of our quick 10 minute brainstorming exercise. However, we quickly cut down each idea because of how short the game would be or how tiring it would be, and that continued until we had nothing left. Eventually, we came up with the best idea ever, which was “Let’s just put them all together in one game!”
Over the course of development, Many Mini Things has gone through several drastic changes. And by drastic, we mean it almost looks like a different game each time we look back. We went from a 4-scenario game to a game where a knight is adventuring through a cave, and ultimately ended up with a game where you play with a capsule machine.
In the past 7 weeks, we’ve faced a number of challenges and obstacles from coding to art, but we’ve also gotten closer to our goal, close enough that we can actually sit a person down and watch them enjoy our game. There is nothing more rewarding in making games than a person coming up to you telling you that they enjoyed what you worked on, and want to play it again someday.
We’ve got 4 weeks left in development, and we’re hard at work making every day, every hour count (with occasional donut breaks, of course).
You can follow our progress on our social media pages:
As children we were always afraid of the noises and shadows we would hear and see at night. On those nights the only way we could fall asleep was to have either our parents check our room or leave a nightlight on. Whether it was the monsters in our closet or the monsters under our bed, we always had the feeling that we were not alone. Midnight Terrors follows a young child named Casey who is tormented by things that go bump in the night. Like all children Casey solves this problem by using imagination, giving life to the toys to keep the monsters away.
In Midnight Terrors you play as a protector of Casey, using the toys to build a maze to keep the monsters from reaching Casey. Whether you use the windup robot that shoots electricity from its arms or the toy soldiers who use their plastic rifles – it’s up to you to keep the monsters from reaching Casey. During the game all types of monsters will challenge you and you must use a combination of toys to keep them away from Casey. Midnight Terrors is an old school tower defense game that focuses on mazing and tower combinations as the main strategy of the game.
The Midnight Terrors team consists of 7 students from 6 different colleges and universities.
Anthony DelBuono – rising senior at Becker College – Studying interactive entertainment – Lead 3d Artist & Texture Artist
Aromie Kim – rising junior at Tufts University – Studying cognitive and brain sciences – Art Director & Producer
Loren Sherman – rising sophomore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Studying computer science – Build Manager & Technical Artist
Benji Smith – rising sophomore at Northeastern University – Studying computer science – Lead Programmer & System Scripting
Ning Xie – rising senior at Mount Holyoke College – Studying computer science – Programmer & Code Review Prep.
Renzo Heredia – rising senior at Berklee College of Music – Film scoring and electronic production and design – Composer & Sound Designer
Joe Lajoie – rising senior at Becker College – Studying interactive entertainment – Lead Designer & 3d Animator
The concept for Midnight Terrors came about from an idea I had been working on for a few weeks. I submitted this idea to Monty Sharma before MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program (SIP) began, and I was allowed to pitch this to the other interns to see if they would be interested in turning this idea into a reality.
As you can tell by now the idea was a hit with all the other interns. During the first week of SIP, the interns were broken up into groups and we given a chance to brainstorm and expand on the idea of Midnight Terrors. From this session the number one feature that everyone wanted was the aspect of light. This would later become known as the “flashlight nuke” – the ability to turn on a flashlight and clear the entire field of monsters.
During the next few weeks, the Midnight Terrors team began creatinga prototype of the game so we could start obtaining feedback on how the gameplay and design was looking. We received a lot of positive feedback; testers thought the concept and story of the game was great! Some people even commented that it was fun to lose just to hear Casey scream.
I’m amazed every time I look at the game how far we have gotten in such a short amount of time and the work ethic of everyone on this team. Some members even work during the weekend just to get it done and into the game before our next build.
Everyday I come to work excited and happy to see how a little concept has slowly turned into a full-fledged and working game before my very eyes. It is exciting to be part of such a talented team. It is so awesome and satisfying to see someone pick up the game, get a giant grin on their face as they play and know that you have been a part of their excitement through the game. When we are not working on the game 40 hours a week, we are showcasing the game at events such as Boston Post Mortem and Boston Game Forum. Both of which I highly recommend attending if you are interested in game development.
We are in the final stages of development for the game, and are having people playtest the game weekly to fine-tune the balancing. We are getting all the feedback we can and changing parts of the game to improve the readability and playability of the game to make it a better user experience. Midnight Terrors has also made an entrance into the social media sphere. We are working on getting our games name out there in order to have an amazing launch. It has been a crazy experience for all of us to make a game in 11 weeks that we can all be proud of. We are excited to see how our hard work has paid off.
So, I’m sure that you’re already thinking to yourself “what the heck is a Cat Tsunami?” Well, a Cat Tsunami isn’t very different from the tsunami waves that you are accustomed to; the only difference really is that a Cat Tsunami is made entirely of thousands and thousands of cats.
Now, you’re probably wondering how a tsunami wave of cats is formed. It all started like any other day, except this was no ordinary day. It was Black Friday and sales could be found everywhere, but there was one sale to rule them all; a catnip sale. Immediately thousands of cats began to claw over one another trying to be the first to make it through the doors of Cat-Mart and purrrrchase some low priced premium gold-label catnip.
You play as Kai the surfing cat. Kai was quick to realize that being a part of a mass horde of cats wouldn’t get him any closer to his dearest desired catnip, so he came up with the one thing he must do to be first to the store. He must surf the waves of cats!
This idea spawned from a number of ideas all created in a brainstorming session at the beginning of MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program to make a game about cats, crazy huh? The team of people you can blame for creating this are:
Lili Sun, MIT – Lead Programmer
Matt Metzger, UMass Lowell – Build Manager & UI Programmer
Paige Coblentz, RISD – Art Director
Aislynn Kilgore, Hampshire College – Lead 3D Artist & Animator
Renzo Heredia, Berklee College of Music – Composer & Sound Designer
Ryan Canuel, Becker College – Producer, UI Artist, & Lead Designer (also, the person to blame for writing this)
I’m amazed every time that I look at where we were compared to where we are now. In these few weeks we have progressed from little more than a title and crazy concept to a fully-fledged and functional game, and that is absolutely amazing. It’s wonderfully satisfying to be able to see someone pick up the game you were a part of making and see them smile, laugh, and become slowly more and more frustrated with virtual seagulls.
The amount of work that goes into creating a game is something a person playing can easily overlook, but the amount of time everyone here puts into their games proves that it has to be a labor of love. Working a 40 hour week, implementing things on the side, showcasing the game at events in Boston on the weekends; are all things done to achieve the goal of developing a game we can all be proud to say is something that we made.
We have reached the stage now where we are constantly getting feedback on Cat Tsunami and what can be done to improve it, and while after working on your game for a long time it can be hard to hear what you’re doing wrong it’s also enormously beneficial as a step towards releasing a final well-polished project. We’ve already begun making changes this week in response to feedback that we’ve received, and will continue to do so into the next few weeks remaining. One of the best parts of developing a game is how interesting it is to watch as the game evolves to meet player’s feedback and become something they enjoy playing as much as we enjoy making it.
