October 23, 2008

Meeting Recap: Game Demo Night at Drexel

On July 30th, 2008, the Philadelphia chapter of the IGDA hosted a game demo night at Drexel University. Five impressive demos were presented ranging from full commercial releases to small student projects. Some highlights from each demo are presented below.

 

Whirled Platform from Three Rings Design presented by Jon Demos

Jon Demos, Lead Artist at Three Rings, was on hand to show off the Whirled Game Platform. Let me note that the demo laptop only had a cellular modem that was barely pulling down dialup speeds and the Whirled Games were still popping into the browser pretty quickly. Kudos to Three Rings on good use of streaming for fast load times.

Jon jumped right into a game of Corpse Craft to demonstrate some features. The game was an RTS type that included some side puzzle games. Users were allowed to upload their own generated content or sell their user-generated-content to other players in the game.

Another kudos to the engineers at Three Rings is that though the game is built in client-side Flash, users can still share game instances. We were told that the game code is being ported to server-side Flash to leverage this sharing even further.

The game makes use of a flexible micro-transaction structure that allows some users to pay for commodities right away, while other users may choose to earn these commodities through game play depending on their preference.

 

Inversion presented by Doug Jones

This alternate reality game from Drexel University students took inspiration from the Matrix trilogy of movies. Specifically, these students were so intrigued by the role of operators that they built a game around it.

The premise of the game is that an "Operator" sits in front of a networked computer looking at a game world that is a virtual recreation of an actual location. In this demo, the location was the Drexel campus. "Agents" are then sent out into this real world location. These agents are equipped with cell phones that have been loaded with a Java program which is a "heartbeat signal". This heartbeat signal program program continually broadcasts the agent's GPS location from the phone to a remote server. The operator reads these heartbeat signals from the server and is able to see the agents' locations in real time on his own computer.

Certain areas in the world are designated as "capture zones" by the game. These capture zones appear as special areas in the 3D world on the operator's screen, but look normal to the agents in the real world. It's up to the operator to call the nearest agents and direct them to these capture zones to score points. All the while there is an opponent operator directing enemy agents to those same locations. Endless fun and intrigue.

 

Smachlby Supremacy presented by Mike Dwyer and Jonathon Chen

This physics showcase was a hodgepodge of game design elements each constructed to allow another display of newtownian interactivity. There were apples being shot into baskets, ghost crabs, tornadoes, evil monkeys and an appearance by some big lava dude who threw boulders with great enthusiasm.

This was a capstone project from graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania's Computer Graphics and Game Technology masters program. The game was built in Gamebryo and made copious use of the PhysX SDK to provide a great deal of dynamic environmental response.

 

Lazy Brains presented by Voxel6

Lazy Brains received quite a bit of popular press recently due to its innovative use of a brain-wave controller. The controller in question was a functional Near Infra-Red device or fNIR. The fNIR device was developed by a student at Drexel during unrelated thesis work. Game Design students learned of the device and realized its potential as a peripheral for interacting with a game world, and thus Lazy Brains was born.

The game world itself highly stylized making copious use of child-like elements such as candy to inspire architecture and weapons. The FNIR device allows a user to concentrate on an appropriate object in the world and thereby manipulate the object. The device itself monitors blood flow in the brain via near infra-red sensors. The user must successfully concentrate to increase blood flow in the brain and thus trigger the events in the game world.

The team achieved their unique visuals by using a pre-release version of the XNA suite Blade3D from Digini. The tools were not quite complete when Voxel6 started work on the game, so they had to overcome a number of technical hurdles in addition to the interesting design challenges presented by using the fNIR as the game controller.

 

Cell Shooter presented by Ian Perera

Cell Shooter is a J2ME-based cell phone game being developed by the University of Pennsylvania's SIGGRAPH Games Group.
The premise is to fly your "brain cell" around the game world and augment your capability by picking up new cells. You pick up these new cells by bumping into them. Cell types that are available for you to grab include thrusters and guns. Once you have enough offense and/or defense you will be able to engage your opponent in shooter style combat. If your cells get shot by your opponent, they are destroyed. If your "brain cell" gets destroyed it's GAME OVER!

Another great night for the Philly IGDA. Thanks go out to all who shared their games and to everyone who came out to enjoy them.

Posted by DanielHettrick at October 23, 2008 08:19 PM