Jumping right in: Actually making games
By Pat Roughan, senior, WPI
Being a student of game design and being a game designer are two radically different things. In the classroom, time is spent explaining the terms and ways of the industry, explaining the successes and analyzing the failures. Sometimes, in one class of a term, students get to try their hand at making an actual game, but it’s usually only brought into the prototype stage when the class ends. Work on it is done at random hours, whenever the students can find time between meetings and other class assignments. The rough husk that’s made by then is either brushed up a bit for a portfolio piece or forgotten, and the student group breaks up and moves on.
Actually making a game, a full game with intent to sell, is a whole different challenge. Do you have the required budget? Is the scope reasonable compared to your resources and allotted time to work? Is there a market for the game? If so, who is it? How much will they pay? These questions are either briefly touched upon or ignored in the classroom setting; after all, no one expects a profitable game to come out of such an environment. They are very real questions that game designers have to answer (that is, if they want to eat). On top of that, in a work environment of making games, there’s no other work interfering with the game creation process. Your job is to make the game and get it out to players, not write a ten-page essay on Paradise Lost and do a biology lab while maybe getting some coding done on the side.
Jumping right in
The first two weeks of MassDiGI’s 2014 Summer Innovation Program were the first time a group of students, including me, from colleges across the northeast got a taste of what being a working game designer is really like.
The goal of the program is to create then launch a product, and the student interns are given all the tools to succeed in a space where it’s okay to fail. We are tasked with making a game that will get an audience and, hopefully, a profit, and work eight hour weekdays with no other obligations. The space operates as a small studio, where the we have to openly keep track of tasks, create builds to show higher-ups, and work towards having a finished product by the end of the eleven-week program.
To help us learn and create better games, industry professionals come in once a week to talk about a section of the game-creating pipeline and offer advice to the us about their own games.
The program is currently beginning it’s third week, the first week being orientation. During that orientation, the staff explained the development pipeline to us, and showed us how to work out well-scoped ideas with a discernible market. We came up with a number of different ideas for games to make for the program, and voted on four games from that pool to work on. The first week of work had us jump right into creating, with a demo build deadline at the end of the week. During that week, four teams of students who had only meet the previous week and had only a brief design to start with created four working demo builds and full documents outlining the plans for the finished games and our target markets.
As one of the interns in the program, the experience has been great. Making games in the classroom is one thing, but making them for players, real paying people, is different, exciting, and nerve-wracking, all at once. Speaking with people in the industry about your game and having them give you great advice back, putting your demo in front of a player and watching them completely break it, making a quick draft of the art and having people respond exactly as you had intended, and everything else I’ve been through these past weeks has been this exhilarating roller coaster that makes me certain of my love for creating games in a way that learning definitions and working in hypotheticals never could.
And the best part is, it’s only just begun.
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Please join us for the 2014 MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program Open House!
For the past 11 weeks, 22 students from 11 colleges and universities have worked on 4 amazing games. You are invited to come on down and play them!
Games include:
To register, please click here.
When: August 7, 2014 – 1:00pm to 3:30pm
Where: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, 61 Sever St., Worcester, MA 01609
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Drop by the Boston Games Forum’s June Playtest Night and visit the MassDiGI table featuring demos from SIP. Registration information for the event is available here.
When: June 28, 2014, 2:00pm to 6:00pm
Where: Microsoft, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA
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Drop by WPI’s Touch Tomorrow festival and visit the MassDiGI table featuring early demos from SIP. More information on Touch Tomorrow is available here.
When: June 14, 2014, 10:00am to 4:00pm
Where: WPI, 100 Institute Rd., Worcester, MA 01609
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Drop by Boston TechJam and visit the MassTech Collaborative booth featuring early demos from MassDiGI SIP teams. More information on Boston TechJam is available here.
When: June 12, 2014, 4:00pm to 9:00pm
Where: City Hall Plaza, Boston, MA
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Join MassDiGI at the annual Merrimack Valley Sandbox Summit. This year’s theme is “Entrepreneurship for All.” Details on the summit are here.
When: June 9, 2014
Where: UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, 50 Warren St, Lowell, MA 01852
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“Tim Loew is helping to spread the reputation of Becker College’s MassDigi around the country. That means more students with skills and ambitions in video game development want to spend their summer in Worcester.”
Read the full story here.
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The importance of community in games
By Malinda Statder, sophomore, Becker College
A little over a week ago, Ichiro Lambe from Dejobaan Games stood in front of a crowd of Worcester-area college students in the lecture hall at Becker College. He spoke animatedly, not about the secrets of creating a great game or the magic to becoming a big name indie, but about something few think about when the subject of game making comes up: community and collaboration.
Students already know the value of collaboration on a small scale; we have all taken part in game jams or, failing that, have worked with one another to complete a project. But, the idea of an entire community based around the creation of games is still a bit of a foreign, out-side-looking-in concept.
Ichiro discussed the growth of gaming communities in different places around the world – from Boston to Vancouver; beginning with, in some cities, a few interested people in a pub and then growing, as he described it, Katamari Damacy-style, into huge, vibrant communities. A community that collaborates provides anything a budding indie needs to make a name for him or herself, from industry connections to honest constructive criticism from programmers to artists and everyone in between.
He also stressed the importance of networking, talking about how simply knowing one person might mean the difference between success and failure in the industry, because it’s not always about what you know, but who you know as well. Ichiro ended his lecture by insisting that all students regularly attend the Boston game development community meet-ups to introduce ourselves to future peers and begin making the acquaintances which may one day be the catalysts for our success.
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Summer game camps for kids
By Tim Loew, executive director, MassDiGI
Each spring I receive questions from middle and high school parents about information on summer computer camps that offer game making. Given the interest, I thought a quick post on the subject might be helpful.
Locally, there are actually quite a few options for kids and I’ve listed several offerings below for parents to consider. If you know of any others, please let me know and I’ll add them. That said, poking around the internet, checking the summer programs scheduled at your local college or university and leafing through community papers might also turn you on to any number of others as well. Let the games begin!
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For all to play: Making a game, making a difference
By Elias Aoude, producer, For All To Play
The idea for our game, Grail to the Thief, came about when we were researching (the For All To Play team are all alumni or current students at WPI) game design for the blind. We conducted interviews at Perkins School for the Blind and performed extensive research which led us to discover that few games are available to the blind and visually impaired, and many of the games that are available are severely dated, lack the quality and polish of games for the sighted, and rely on synthesized computer voices such as screen readers in order to play. Grail to the Thief will address these problems, and the game will be just as accessible and exciting an experience for the blind and visually impaired as it will be for the sighted.
So, with that in mind and a build in-hand, we started up an indie studio in Worcester and are at the halfway point of a crowdfunding campaign for Grail to the Thief on Kickstarter.
You can play a browser-based prototype of the game. It requires Google Chrome or Opera and can be found here: foralltoplay.com/prototype. If you have some time, please check it out.
The game, when launched, will be an interactive audio adventure for Windows, Mac, and Linux (a standalone executable will not require a web browser) that can be played using only sound, without the need for visuals. Grail to the Thief has been designed with the needs of the blind and visually impaired in mind but can be enjoyed by everyone. The game will deliver an exciting, immersive experience in which the player will always be fully aware of what is happening through the use of voice-overs, sound effects, ambient sound and music.
Game players will make choices through a conversation tree from which they can select commands, eliminating the confusion and frustration that comes with traditional text adventure games which require players to type in commands to progress. It is a nostalgic throwback to childhood favorites such as Zork, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango, and draws inspiration from old BBC radio dramas and the movie Time Bandits.
If our Kickstarter campaign is successfully funded, Grail to the Thief will be available as a DRM-free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux in August 2014.
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