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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Dan Cherkassky, seen here, fleeing from himself.
Hello, my name is Dan Cherkassky and I’m the artist working on Energy Drive at SIP. Coming from a background where I was focused on digital sculpting and painting, switching over to meet the requirements for Energy Drive has been a bit of a challenge. Though the buildings we use are 3D models, they had to be adapted from the sprites used in the original game. This proved difficult thanks to the inclusion of a number of buildings, the need to keep their look varied, and making textures that are not too realistic or cartoony.
For example, a regular solar panel is composed of a number of cells, which normally would make for a fair amount of detail. However, we tried to keep with the original game’s colors and initially the mix of the two ended up looking weird. Having few details on the model also made it look bland, so we looked for an in-between; we came up with a simple solar panel model, with the cells being made from a light overlay image, giving it just enough detail. It was not too real and not too cartoony, exactly what our content owners wanted.
Many other buildings were fairly straightforward, as a few details here and there were not difficult to maintain. The wind turbine, however, proved difficult because of how much simpler it was than most of the other models. Out models do not have details, such as bricks or paneling, but they do have larger depressions and extrusions, such as windows and pipes, neither of which are really present on a wind turbine. This resulted in a very simple looking structure, even by the game’s art standards. Fortunately, it turned out that this simplicity was remedied once the building was animated, as the spinning blades drew attention from the building and looked more like a real wind turbine. Maybe it was the lack of spinning from the start that caused the visual disconnect, but whatever the reason, we felt better about the turbine once it was animated.
Overall it was great working with varying styles, new techniques, and simply getting things done. It’s great to work on a project like this, especially when it teaches you so much! – Dan Cherkassky
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Scott Henderson discusses the social impact of social cause games.
When non-profiteers and do-gooders ask me for the one piece of advice I could give to help market their cause, here’s what I tell them:
” Not everyone cares about your cause. But someone does, and they can connect you to others who do too.“
Let’s accept reality. The world is full of problems – some we can solve and others we need to figure out how to live with. In this hyper-connected age, you can be easily overwhelmed with stories of great causes from around the world and in our own backyard that need your help.
What’s true for causes is true for games. We’re competing in a very crowded marketplace and need to find a way to stand out and attract the people who care about our cause or game.
Most causes and games don’t have big Hollywood blockbuster-sized budgets to blanket TV, radio, and the Internet with advertisements. However, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of the social media ecosystem, everyone has a soapbox and megaphone to gather a crowd.
For those who want to bring social causes and gaming together, you have a range of approaches you can take to attract your crowd – some obvious and others not so much. Here are five that come to mind:
Virtual Goods/Donations
Zynga has helped a number of charities sell virtual goods and then donate the proceeds. This method started with a sweet potato seed packet, which benefitted relief charities in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.
Game Mechanics
Trying to educate players on the complexity of energy conservation? Want to teach health care providers ways to improve their patient diagnoses? Want to illustrate the challenge of those living on the edge of poverty? Create your game around the factors that drive those issues and challenge players to figure out how to win.
Narratives
You can develop story arcs that help players have fun while gaining a deeper appreciation of the issue. It doesn’t have to be a morality tale or preaching. Maybe you create a quest for players to overcome. Or maybe you set your game in a developing country.
Characters
Want to challenge people’s stereotypes? Develop characters who are dealing with disability, homelessness, natural disaster, or some other issue. Make these characters relatable and portray them in a unique light. Even subtle character traits can make a huge difference.
Compassion Drives Action
The word “compassion” comes from the words that mean “suffer” and “together”. Your mind has mirror neurons . These neurons make it possible for you to look at others and feel what they’re feeling – as if you’re gazing in the mirror. When we sense pain in others, we will take immediate, specific action to remove that pain.
However you choose to bring social causes and gaming together, make sure to give your players ways to support you in taking action. – Scott Henderson, Cause Shift
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To read the press release, please click here. To read the story at Telegram.com, please click here. To request a survey, please email info[at]massdigi.org. Thank you.
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Are you an educator who teaches game development, art, music, programming or design? Interested in course or curriculum development? Game-based learning? Working on research in the field? Is your company developing products for the space? Are you just plain curious about games and education? Faculty, teachers, professionals and researchers from college to high school to kindergarten to industry are welcome to drop by, meet colleagues, share ideas, make new friends and network. Please click here to register.
In addition to the meet-up, attendees will have a chance to visit the MassDiGi Summer Innovation Program featuring student developed projects. 18 students from 9 different colleges and universities are participating in SIP. For more information on the program, please visit the SIP pages on the website.
Location:
Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Labs 313/314, 61 Sever St., Worcester, MA 01609
Light snacks and refershments will be available.
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