Innovation Stage at the Expo: October 2, 2013 – DCU Center, Worcester, MA
Join MassDiGI along with special guests Dejobaan Games, High Class Kitsch, 80HD and Play Nimbus at the Innovation Stage! Click here for more info.
Meet MassDiGI: September 27, 2013 – Becker College, Worcester, MA
Come on down, check out the Becker IGDA chapter and “Meet MassDiGI” – a great opportunity to network, talk games and more! All Worcester area game development students are welcome.
When: September 27, 2013 – 6:00 p.m.
Where: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, 61 Sever St., Lecture Hall/210, Worcester, MA
More information can be found here.
MassDiGI receives $1.4M grant for New Ventures Center
80 William St., future home of the MassDiGI NVC at Becker College.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration has awarded $1.4 million to the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute to help create the MassDiGI New Ventures Center at Becker College. Please click here to read the press release and stories in the Boston Globe, Gamasutra, GamePolitics, MassLive, Develop, GameSpot, Polygon and Worcester Telegram.
Boston Festival of Indie Games: September 14, 2013 – MIT, Cambridge, MA
Visit MassDiGI at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 14, 2013. Drop by and check out our table – play student-developed games, learn about our program and services and more!
NECN: Business – VIDEO
MassDiGI SIP students show off their games at Open House.
Playing games with the future – 8/8/13
Playing games with the future
By Tim Loew, executive director, MassDiGI
There were no careers in video game development 20 years ago; not in the way we understand gamedev today. The idea that thousands and thousands of students would dedicate their academic careers – and their futures – to studying game-making would have been viewed as farfetched.
But today, according to the Entertainment Software Association, about 400 US colleges, universities, art and trade schools in all 50 states now offer courses, certificates, and degrees in those fields with more programs coming online each year. And there is a good chance many of these passionate students took part in a game jam, went to one of nearly 700 programs at more than 100 summer game camps, or even published an indie game when they were in high school.
In a multi-billion dollar, highly competitive, fast-moving yet spiky industry driven by talent, this pipeline presents tremendous opportunities and challenges, both in the region and across the nation.
Recently, MassDiGI conducted an informal survey of a sampling of public and private schools in New England and upstate New York, an area that The Princeton Review says is home to several of the top undergraduate and graduate game programs in the US, in order to get a better of understanding of our region’s role in the future of the video game industry.
Eighteen survey respondents, from community colleges to research institutions, reported a total of 3,752 students working towards an undergraduate or graduate degree with a major, minor, or concentration in game design, game programming, game production, game art, game music/audio, animation, media studies, or computer science; 2,407 of those students were reported by the twelve participating institutions in Massachusetts.
Given that the total number of direct game industry employees in our state is just over 2,000, what do local organizations and individuals need to do to ensure our ecosystem can draw, absorb, and retain a healthy share of these young, skilled students after graduation—so necessary if we want to capture their energy to grow our innovation and creative industries?
At MassDiGI, we think about that question every day. And based on our own experiences with students from many institutions, we have a few ideas, some of which are noted below. We certainly could use yours as well; please send them our way.
• Increase access, quantity, and quality of game internship programs for students. In such a rapidly moving industry, connecting students with real-world experience is critical.
• Expand mentorship initiatives for game students and young game entrepreneurs, particularly in areas that complement disciplines such as marketing and analytics.
• Advance the public understanding of what valuable skills these game students have and where those skills can be applied across a broad array of sectors beyond games, including education, training, simulation, publishing, planning, healthcare, advertising, data/scientific visualization, and user interface and experience design.
• Develop targeted policies such as incentives that help game startups and established game companies compete, grow, and expand.
• Play more games!
Clearly, our state and our region have an opportunity to put the amazing skills of these talented young people to work right here. Sit ludos incipiunt!
*This blog originally appeared on Boston.com.
Playing grown up: The education of a game developer – 8/7/13
Playing grown up: The education of a game developer
By Brandon Cimino, junior, Becker College
Everybody knows that “college is a transitional phase.” Put kids in, give them some debt, and adults come out. That’s the standard procedure.
Kids have almost no control over their lives, and that’s stifling. Adults have a ton, and when a kid first starts out as an adult, they tend to either screw up, or be paralyzed for fear that they will. Low-intensity doses of Adulthood buffer the transition from Kid to Grown-Up.
Brandon Cimino
College is full of these buffers, mostly on a personal level: when you eat, what you eat, when you sleep, when you wake up, what you do awake, what you think you should do, whether or not you actually get off your butt and do any of those things you should. What to learn, and what to do with that knowledge.
There’s plenty that college alone can’t, or has difficulty, buffering. Internships, like the MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program (SIP), are the next step up.
There are lots of different reasons to pursue a program such as SIP, and nobody has just one. Some of us have never had our own earned income. Some have never lived away from home for the summer. Some have never even made a video game, and are testing the waters of the game development. For me, I wanted two main things: the first was skill with game development, which is simple enough. The second is trickier – I wanted to see what it felt like to be a grown-up.
I had a key transition when my team, working on BrainFrame, went to meet with our partners, NeuroScouting, in Cambridge. It felt like a field trip for most of the trip there, just one with an oddly small group. I still felt like a student. Then we arrived at the building NeuroScouting worked from. We made our way up the floors and stood outside of the elevators awkwardly until Wesley Clapp, co-founder of NeuroScouting and our main partner, let us in to the work area.
The rooms were huge, open spaces with rows of long tables set up. It would have looked like a cafeteria were there not computers and noses to the grindstone at every seat. I couldn’t help but see everyone in the room and think, “these people are attractive.” Not because they were all pretty, but that I wanted to be near them, and talk to them, and be like them. In my imagination, whenever I glanced at someone’s computer screen I was getting to see something top-secret and super-smart. I have no idea what any of them were working on, but the productivity of the room, the determination in the eyes of everyone there, and the sparks flying from their brains as they each worked on the Next Big Thing, was infectious.
Still, though, I felt like I was on a field trip. I was still on the outside looking in. Then Wes took us to our meeting room, a gorgeous glass box at the corner of the floor. That was when things felt real. I wasn’t going to watch a business meeting, I was going to be in a business meeting. I looked around at my team, curious if they felt this was as important a moment as I did. They were all very calm, and I was glad for it. Wes took a spot at the head of the table, and MassDiGI’s Monty Sharma sat next to him. In what was in my romanticized mind a coming-of-age moment, I sat on Wes’ other side.
The meeting was fantastic. Everyone on our team spoke, and we made a ton of progress. BrainFrame is a tricky project: it’s a gamified self-help tool for the iPad intended to exercise the executive functions, similar to Brain Age and Lumosity. The catch is that NeuroScouting was insistent that every game include user-uploaded photos, that way they could practice skills such as facial recognition, something other tools have difficulty tackling. As neat as that sounded, I was terrified that we simply weren’t going to make that concept work for us. I had no idea if we could make a product that fit their strict requirements that still fulfilled both the needs of the game and the needs of the science.
It’s taken a lot of iteration and compromise, but I think I can now say that the BrainFrame team has managed to produce something that meets those goals. We are ready to deliver this game to NeuroScouting so that they can analyze it’s scientific merit, and ready to show it to others as a game we can be proud of. And while I cannot speak for anyone else, I at least am a huge step closer to being an adult.
The art of pitching – 8/6/13
The art of pitching
Blog by Rachel Roberie, second year, Northeastern University
As the MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program moves into the homestretch, the Wobbles team has been busily shifting from content creation to polish adjustments and quality assurance. In preparation for the open house on August 8th, we have been fixing up our pitches and clearing out bugs so we can better display our game to prospective buyers.
Delivering a pitch is not as easy as memorizing some words, especially for people who are intimidated by talking to strangers or large groups. Just like anything else, pitching is a developed skill, and over the summer we have been given many chances to practice. On July 15th, half of us hosted a TechSandBox demo night while the other half went to Boston Indies and demoed Wobbles there. On July 16th many of us went to our second Boston Postmortem of the summer. Every time a mentor visits, we do a round of demos for them. Each time we pitch the game a different team member contributes, so everybody gets more comfortable. When we speak to non-gamers and people outside of the target demographic, we play the game for them so they can see the polished parts, describing the mechanics in layman’s terms and emphasizing the most widely appealing aspects, like the graphics and the core fun. More experienced players or target audiences are simply handed the game wordlessly and observed. We take note of how easy the UI is to interact with, whether or not they know where to go, and if they get frustrated by any particular features.
Pitching Wobbles
For instance, we learned that when we had our in-game unpause button in the corner, even though it was pulsing, most people attempted to begin playing and were confused when the tray did not respond. To fix this we made the game begin as soon as the player tries to drag down a platform. When we learned that people were not able to read all of the tutorial text before Wobbles started falling, we made our guides more concise. These alterations are small but crucial to a smooth play experience, and a totally smooth and hassle-free play experience is necessary to make a casual mobile game successful.
As the only team working without a partner, Wobbles in particular is focusing on social networking and website reviews so that we can have a strong start with a strong product immediately at release. We already have several websites lined up for review copies.
Laura Gagnon, lead artist, and I have also been hard at work on the visual polish of the game, and it’s finally beginning to look as nice as the other games on the app store right now. Something as simple as blurring the background so the perspective – foreground and background – is more strongly established made the game look much more professional. We have been adding a few particle effects to indicate what is to be interacted with vs what is just for decoration; the stars that you collect in each level to unlock new ones are now glittery! It’s the small, neat visual rewards that give games that extra boost of fun and appeal – Tiny Wings’ art, for example, has a clean and candy-colored vector style that, in combination with its soundtrack, lends it a very calming and sweet atmosphere.
I’m really psyched to get this game out into the market, since it’s the first one I have been a part of making. The mechanic is unique and the characters remind me of the little guys in Pocket God – quirky and really fun to mess with.
A version of this blog first appeared at http://rroberie.wordpress.com/.
Building skills: Meeting challenges and overcoming obstacles – 7/31/13
Building skills: Meeting challenges and overcoming obstacles
By Connie Hildreth, fourth year, Hampshire College
The goal of SIP, MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program, is to make a game, from start to finish, over the course of a summer. From the beginning this made me nervous. I’ve been conditioned to make projects small and downsizable into even smaller parts, and everything about the program sounded worryingly large in scale. Sitting comfortably at the other end of the summer, I’ve seen that things turned out fine, but there were a couple extra challenges SIP had that I hadn’t even thought to worry about until they had passed.
Connie Hildreth
SIP operates by partnering local professionals that have ideas for games with undergraduate and graduate students studying game development. In the first week, they pitched us their ideas for games, and we divided up into teams among the projects. The game I’m working on goes by the code name “Robot Orphan Workforce,” which our team is working on under the mentorship of Ziba Scott from Popcannibal. It’s a construction simulator where orphaned robots build houses and famous monuments out of blocks. When we were shown Ziba’s prototype and given his pitch, though, that wasn’t initially clear to us.
Some other SIP projects had a single, clear path to becoming a finished game, but our game was more wide open. The prototype we saw had little shapes building larger buildings out of blocks, with the rest of the features and characterization left for us to decide. Because of this, all of us came to the table deeply excited about very different games that could not all be made, and picking a direction was a huge challenge.
What we could plausibly do with our game depended a lot on how much we expected to be able to get done with our group over the summer. The trick was we didn’t know each other. We’re all students, and intimately aware of what happens to group projects with even just one or two unmotivated, unskilled or uncooperative members. We didn’t know each other’s strengths or whether we’d be able to count on our whole team, so it was hard to say how much work we could manage.
The sneakiest problem, though, was that we had no idea what a summer was. As students, our whole lives have been punctuated by summer breaks, so you might expect that we’d know how long a summer was. Really, though, we had no clear picture of how much five people working full time could do over a summer cycle. Projects have, for us, always been done in semesters or shorter bursts of crunch time, competing with other academic, extracurricular and social commitments. We had no frame of reference for planning out a dedicated summer project difficult.
Still, we had to make decisions, and the first decision our team really made is symbolic of how we’ve dealt with these issues. We decided to make the builders robots that we designed modularly, with randomly assigned hands, feet, hats and clothes. It let us build as many art assets as we wanted to decorate them, while keeping it a non-tragedy when something we had made for them had to be cut.
Our game has gone through a lot of cuts gameplay-wise as well. We wanted players to be able to design their own buildings, but had to face the reality that we couldn’t make that a good experience and have the rest of our game still be fun in the time we had. Physics were going to play a major role at first. Orphans were going to be sorted into teams, which would be used to upgrade their stats, some were going to roll around on wheels, while others floated on rocket boosters. These things won’t make it into the game, and some were very hard to give up on, but by cutting them, we’ve made room for things like shooting rockets of oil to keep the orphans from getting rusty and hugging your orphans with rainbows.
More importantly than that, maybe, is that by cutting those features, we made our game completable. We now have an almost-finished game to match the almost-finished summer. We know what our game is now, and we know what each of us does well. We know now that our team was dedicated and skilled enough to pull off quite a lot. And now we know how long a summer is, though I wish it was a little longer so I could spend more time with my team and our game.
VentureFizz: Paving the Way for Game Development Students
When you are a student in Massachusetts, the opportunities for learning beyond the classroom are pretty abundant. You just need to have a clear sense of what interests you and to know where to look! Click here to read the rest of the story on VentureFizz.com.
