Posted Aug. 12, 2014 in “Students”
Mass DiGI taps students’ game development skills
One moment you’re swatting flies, the next you’re spinning records – and at any other time you could be flying a plane, making a sock puppet sing, or simply washing a window.
Successfully
achieve these various tasks, and you win virtual capsule toys (like
the sort that come tumbling out of coin-op machines).
Such
is the simple but addictive premise of Many Mini Things, a
motion-controlled game created by students from WPI and other local
colleges as part of the annual MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program.
“It’s
funny, zany humor,” says lead producer Pat Roughan ’15. “It
turns mundane stuff into a fun game.”
The
prestigious program, which challenges its student participants to
create a fully functional game in 11 weeks, was held at Becker
College from May 20 to Aug. 7, culminating with an open house at the
school’s Weller Academic Center.
Twenty-two
students from 11 schools – including Roughan, Owen West ’15, and
Sienna McDowell ’17 – were chosen from a pool of 150 applicants.
As they broke into groups and worked on creating four games, they
were housed at Becker and given a stipend for their work.
“It
was our literal job for 11 weeks straight,” said Roughan, a double
major in game design and professional writing. Unlike during the
school year, “we had no other distractions.”
Several
game ideas were brainstormed during orientation, she explained, then
four were ultimately chosen and participants were split into groups
based on their strengths. Drafting, designing, building, and numerous
rounds of testing followed.
The
four games that resulted were Many Mini Things, Midnight Terrors
(players ward off nightmarish creatures in a little boy’s bedroom),
Cat Tsunami (players guide a surfing cat through whimsical
landscapes, earning coins and thwarting enemies), and Limbs.
McDowell,
a Philadelphia native, worked on the latter, which challenges players
to match up zombie limbs on a grid and inevitably create a new body
out of them.
As
she noted, the program helped her get a grasp of her own potential.
“I’ve learned that, even if you’re convinced you won’t be
able to do something, just go at it,” says the interactive media
and game development major. “If you try, you’ll get at least
halfway there, which might just be enough.”
Meanwhile,
Many Mini Things makes use of a Leap Motion controller, a relatively
new technology that senses finger movements without the need for
touch. Players grab, hit, and move objects on the screen by
performing the motion in mid-air.
As
Roughan explained, the development process could be tough at times,
given the need to create digital objects that would prompt natural
reactions (such as a fly that needs swatting). With a multi-player
function, the game is “bright, colorful, and cartoony,” she said,
and fits into the “party game” genre.
“It’s
been a great experience,” said Roughan, who is from Wilton, Conn.
“It’s not what I expected at all, which is a good thing.”
Most
of all, it helped her gain an understanding of how to begin a career
in the indie gaming field, her end goal.
West,
a game design major and art minor who served as tech artist for Many
Mini Things, says he would also ultimately like to end up in the
indie market, although he notes that it’s difficult to break into,
because you need to be self-managing, work quickly, and have a
“really good idea.” Cultural phenomenona such as Candy Crush Saga
and Flappy Bird are “1 in 100,000,” he says.
So,
he notes, he’ll likely start by trying to get into a AAA studio
(the top tier) as a QA game tester, a position he says should help
him gain a wider understanding of the overall business and members of
the company.
“It
was eye-opening,” West, of Northampton, Mass., says of the Summer
Innovation Program. “I can pretty easily build upon the skills I
learned this summer.”
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