Ms. Baumel is working with many people to make “Weaver,” an XNA/ XBox game where you build worlds. This is the UMBC Game Developers’ Club’s 3D project for Spring 2010. 
Web Site to come! More pending! Elizabeth, please keep us posted.
Page 8 of 12
Mr. Lau has been working in the Baltimore games industry for several years, has spoken at UMBC many times (usually about how to get a job in the industry), and will be teaching Art 384, “Introduction to 3D Computer Animation” this Fall. He is a ZBrush master.
In addition to working at Zenimax Online for the past few years, he has also worked at Breakaway Games and done some architectural rendering. He also has a side business making small sculptures in ZBrush that get printed via rapid prototyping. One is shown below; more at www.launch3d.com.
Ching Lau's Dragon
This weekend, I was honored to be a judge for the Imagine Cup National Finals. They have two competitions for students, one for Software Design and a new one this year for Game Design. Of course, I was there as a Game Design judge, as was UMBC grad and adjunct faculty member Katie Hirsch of Firaxis Games. This year’s theme was to create a game reflecting one the UN Millennium Development Goals: hunger and poverty, universal primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, HIV/AIDS and malaria, environment, and global partnership.
Of the 269 entries, ten games made it to the finals. I was on one of the two judging panels that met on Saturday to select the final four games to advance to the final round on Monday at the Newseum in DC. Monday included a presentation of the final four games, a showcase of all ten finalists, and keynote addresses by director James Cameron, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, DOE Director of Educational Technology Karen Cator. The winners were:
- Grand prize and $8,000
Sixth by team “To Be Announced”, a puzzle game in which you play a child in a slum, trying to find drinking water for your family. You find items you can use or trade in your quest and meet people in the slum who can help you along the way. The goal is to educate players about the struggles of the worlds poor. - First prize and $4,000
Alterra by team “Coffee Powered Altruism”, a strategy game ambitiously addressing all of the UN Millennium goals. For each one, you are shown a map of a real country with dots representing population (above and below poverty, educated vs. uneducated, etc.), and you attempt to drag in job training centers or other tools to change the makeup of the population without exhausting your budget. - Second prize and $3,000
RoboRecycler by team “Ifrit Salsa”, a kids game where you are a robot collecting items and getting points for depositing them in the correct recycling bin. - Third prize
Antitoxin Squad by team “LeveL13”, a cooperative two-player game where you plant seeds to defeat the pollution blobs.
Teams ranged from High School students to PhD students, and games from 2D sprites to full 3D FPS. Overall, an excellent set of games and a great experience. I’d certainly encourage some of our students to try next year.
Marc Olano
M. Bradley
There really was a Milton Bradley, and he received patent #53,561 on April 3, 1866, for a board game, in which one strives to avoid various character flaws and reach “Happy Old Age.”
From the drawing provided in the patent application, you could make a pretty authentic board. Here’s the link.
The “Storybook” team (Derek Ragos, Teresa Oswald, Juan Carlos Rivera, and John Cservek) turned in this game for mid-terms.
It’s a side-scroller, and there’s lots of teleporting– the idea is that the levels are pages in a book of many stories. The graphics are very nice, and Teresa, the only programmer, started this semester with no iPhone development knowledge, and got it working before mid-terms, which is just awesome.
You start in a forest at night...
... and go to the Pyramids ...
Please post comments or send email to dragos1 at umbc dot edu
“Dr. Voodoo” is a game by Jenn Dahlke and Bryan Eastlack. In it, you play an alternative medicine practitioner who sneaks around in hospitals curing people with spells made from things like ice cubes, bacon, and 8-balls.
Bryan learned Objective-C, XCode, and the iPhone class system this semester, before mid-terms, to make this game. If you ever fail to hire this guy, you’ll die regretting it.
As you can see, the game is really cute:
Dr. Voodoo consults a patient, who needs ice and a bucket.
Dr. Voodoo, caught by the man, and the sick suffer on.
Team Titan Climber (Michael Marcellino, Kevin Kohri, Dale Case, Alexander Pole, and Chris Cromwell) turned this in for mid-terms:
userpages.umbc.edu/~mmichae1/TitanClimber/game.html
In this game, you play regular guy who has to kill a Titan. Each Titan is a level in the game, and has an elemental theme. It’s kind of like the old “Crazy Climber” game, but with Titanic body lice and swordplay.
Please send feedback to mmichae1@umbc.edu, or in the comments below.
Chris Hecker gave this talk; Gamasutra coverage here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=27646
“… because of the idea that, if you do this, you’ll get that, you end up hating the ‘this’ and focusing on the ‘that.'”
And if the “this” is your game, that’s bad.
Includes an interview with Dr. Olano about the jam…
http://www.gazette.net/stories/03172010/burtnew211241_32559.php
I had mused about posting games from old patents. Here’s one: Blue and Gray, by Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger.
It’s a Tafl variant: you have a captain and some men. You win if your captain reaches the center of the board (usually in Tafl, it’s center-to-edge). The guards kill each other by jumping, and try to block the opposing captain’s way.
Here’s a link to the patent application’s PDF