Game Change: Where Have We Been & Where Are We Going?
November 27, 2012, 7:00 p.m.
Becker College, 80 William Street, Worcester, MA
Walter Somol serves as the director of tech community outreach at Microsoft NERD, helping to grow and foster the technology community in the Greater Boston area. Before coming to Cambridge, Mr. Somol spent over five years in Redmond, WA managing one of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business Development and Publishing teams. His job in IEB included structuring and negotiating complex strategic partnerships, evaluating new business models, growing the online business via Xbox LIVE, publishing and distributing new video games, and developing and fostering long-term relationships with partners. Mr. Somol has worked with many of the top-tier Xbox 360, PC, online, and mobile publishers and developers.
Free and open to the community. Seating is limited. RSVP to lectures(at)becker.edu.
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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 hosted by Anzovin Studio and the City of Holyoke and sponsored by MassDiGI, EDC of Western Mass and Paper City Brewery. RSVP here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/4676813475
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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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