Love games? Dig free pizza? Open to all students and faculty. Drop by the Thursday, November 1st at 7:00 p.m. at 106 West Village G, Northeastern University and hear about its programs and services including the 2013 Game Challenge and Summer Innovation Program – and learn about how you can get involved! Hosted by the NU Game Development Club, Animation Club and Creative Industries program.
Location: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Hawk’s Nest, 61 Sever St., Worcester, MA 01609
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/384231121645192/
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Do you love playing games? Join gamers from across the area on Saturday, October 20, 2012 for the biggest and best 24-hour game marathon to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, a Children’s Miracle Network Hospital. Please click here for more information: www.boston.extra-life.org.
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Love games? Dig free pizza? Open to all students and faculty. Drop by the Thursday, October 18th at 6:00 p.m. in the Hawk’s Nest at Becker College to meet MassDiGI, hear about its programs and services including the 2013 Game Challenge and Summer Innovation Program – and learn about how you can get involved with the brand new Student IGDA Chapter at Becker.
RSVP to info(at)massdigi.org.
Location: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Hawk’s Nest, 61 Sever St., Worcester, MA 01609
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Creatives in the Pioneer Valley – – it is time to start talking! Find out who else works in the area and what they do; network, chit chat and make new friends. This free event is co-hosted by Steve Porter & PorterHouse Media and the City of Holyoke and sponsored by MassDiGI, EDC of Western Mass and Paper City Brewery. RSVP here: http://creativevalley.eventbrite.com/
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Co-presented by the MIT Game Lab and Boston Indies, Boston Festival of Indie Games (BostonFIG) is a debut celebration of independent game development with emphasis on the New England region. Boston Festival of Indie Games seeks to support and showcase the efforts of independent game developers by providing a free public event that encourages attendees to share and interact with games in various media. Boston Festival of Indie Games is focused on creating an intersection between community, academic and independent interests in game play. For more information, please visit www.bostonfig.com. Sponsored by:
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“If you are looking for evidence that video games won’t turn your brain to mush, pay a visit to Becker College in Worcester. For students like Andrew Niemi, gaming — as it is called — is a career path and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
“I played (video games) and always dreamed of owning my own company,” says Niemi, who will be a junior at Becker this fall. “I was playing Mario Brothers, and I always wanted to make a game like that.”
He is getting his chance. So are many others who look at video games in a whole different way than many of us. For them, the games are a learning tool that can save lives — literally.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute senior Cordell Zebrose, for example, is working on a “serious” video game called “On Call.” It’s being designed in collaboration with UMass Medical School to improve communication between nursing and medical students.
Niemi and Zebrose are two of 18 students in the Summer Innovation Program (SIP) at Becker College’s Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (Mass DiGI).” Click here to read the full story at Worcester Magazine.
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It was this heavy.
Beta
The definition of our beta phase is ‘Pencils Down, all work complete’. As our projects approached beta, all of the pie in the sky, nice-to-have features flee from the minds of the team. When a project enters beta, you work with what you have. You don’t enter beta until you have what you need. But once you do, your goal is to polish polish polish. Every feature, every mechanic, every asset has to be made the best it can be. That means testing, bug-fixing, optimizing…anything that needs to be made better than it already is, anything that needs to look good for real people to look at.
Release
Release is probably the most stressful part of the production process. You haven’t been able to do everything you’ve wanted to do, but you’ve (hopefully) done everything you’ve had to do. You polished and you polished and you polished. You tested, internally, maybe even externally, you’ve killed bugs and you’ve marketed and everything you’ve thought to do. And then you hope it’s enough to succeed.
Walt’s Take
My take is that Beta and Release are actually low stress/high intensity times for the project team. On these projects, with a fixed date when the program ended, the teams got to experience a typical game development ‘hard deadline’ to ship. With a looming deadline, the stress about decisions evaporates – the hard reality of time pressure makes decisions self-evident.
As for release, something always goes wrong with release, and it is never what you expect. For the Nanoswarm team, we were actually delayed shipping the product to Apple because the students’ company, 80HD Games was not officially formed yet. They were code and feature complete, but had to hold off until they got the official paperwork.
One of the most satisfying results for me of the SIP program was that the students got to see projects in a complete cycle, from Concept to Release. Many developers go years in the industry without seeing a complete cycle and our program got folks to see it in just one summer. – Walt Yarbrough & Oleg Brodskiy
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Please click here to read Telegram.com’s coverage of MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program Open House and click here to read Go Local Worcester’s.
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Jim McCarthy, Artist, Self-Prettyfier.
I’m James McCarthy and I attend RPI and this summer I work for 80HD Games on their award-winning game, Nanoswarm. Some of my work on Nanoswarm included UV mapping the 3D models. UV mapping is one of those jobs most people underestimate and tend to dislike, and while I admit it’s not my favorite part of the 3D process, it’s an important part nonetheless. UV mapping is essentially taking a 3D model and unfolding its sides, then laying it flat on a 2D plane, like opposite of origami or papercraft. The names come from the variables, U and V, which represent X and Y on a 2D texture plane. X, Y, and Z are already variables used in 3D space, so we use U and V to store this texture information as separate variables. On average, it takes as long to UV map an object as it does to model it; the more complex the model, the longer it takes to map.
Yes, that is a Game Boy. And yes, it is awesome.
The first thing I did before UVing was look at what type of game we were making, what the player will be able to see, and the game’s art style. For this particular project the camera is high above the nanoswarm and the art style is simple and stylized, which means the resolution of the textures doesn’t need to be large. Having the camera high up also means a model can have subtle seams (two parts of a texture that don’t transition nicely).
After planning the UV maps, I started unfolding the 3D models onto a 2D plane. Here’s an example of an unfolded crate.
No, it’s not the Companion Cube. We can all weep together.
I then added a placeholder texture, so that I could identify which side corresponds to which location in 2D. This texture also helps identify any stretching and shows how much resolution each side has assigned to it (the smaller the squares, the more resolution).
It’s the Psychedelic Cube!
As you can see, most of the shapes on the model and 2D plane are identical, which means tiling wouldn’t really be noticeable, given the camera height and art style. When you lay two of these sides on top of each other on the 2d texture plane, they both hold identical information and have no variation between them. The model also showed some texture stretching (most visible on the flat corner at the center of the image) which I quickly remedied by changing the shape on the 2D plane slightly.
Now, it's the Cool Cube. Yes, I am sorry, thanks for asking.
You can now see that the identical sides on the object are the same color, and that a lot of space has been freed up on the texture sheet. This free space was used for other objects’ UV maps, so that multiple objects use the same texture, saving even more space. You can also see the seams I mentioned earlier where the triangle meets the edges, but once a texture is painted on the crate it will not be very noticeable. Now that the model is successfully UV mapped, I exported the 2D image you see and gave it to the texture artist, so that he can make the model look nice and pretty. – Jim McCarthy
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“Chris Gengler traced his finger across the screen of an iPad, guiding a cloud of black particles down a white corridor, evading machine gun bullets.
He was playing a video game called Nanoswarm. Just a few months ago, it was nothing more than a cool idea. Today, it’s nearly finished — an impressive achievement, considering that Gengler and his fellow game designers are not professionals, but undergraduates at Becker College in Worcester.
They were among 18 students, mostly from Massachusetts colleges, participating in a state-sponsored summer program aimed at developing the next generation of video game designers.” Click here to read the complete story at the Boston Globe.
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