Zineth, developed by Rensselaer students, and an winner at the 2013 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase

With a mix of electronic arts, computer science, and one of the best game design programs in the country, Rensselaer students produce a regular fount of polished, professional video games, and we hear regularly from students and graduates of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) program who’ve made good in the game design world. (To see some of those games in action, save the date for this year’s GameFest, April 26-27 at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.) Ben Chang, co-director of the GSAS program, reached out to me recently with some of the latest accolades. Here’s the low-down:

-Zineth, designed by Rensselaer students, was selected as one of the eight winners of the 2013 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase.  The student competition received over 300 entries from around the world, Chang said. The winners will be exhibited at the IGF Festival and will compete for an additional Best Student Game award.  The IGF, known as “the Sundance of Indie Games,” is held at the Game Developers Conference, which attracts over 25,000 attendees from the games industry and academia each year.

Zineth was created by The Arcane Kids: Russell Honor, Jacob Knipfing, Tom Astle, Sylvia Forrest, Tom Lanciani, Evan Gonzalez, and Dan Spaulding.

-Electronic Arts MFA candidate Anton Hand and his team Rust Ltd. won the Unity3D DX11 Challenge, a competition run by Unity to showcase the latest version of their engine. On the competition website, their winning entry, Museum of the Microstar, is described as “stunning.”

According to Chang, Unity is one of the most popular game engines in the world, particularly in small studios and indie games, and “drives over half the games in the App Store.”  Chang said Museum of the Microstar “combines advanced DX11 effects and massive GPU particle simulations with a critique of mankind’s drive for technological advancement.”

-Students from the Rensselaer Game Development Club won ”Best Game” in the local branch (or “Albany Jam”) of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Global Game Jam 2013, a 48-hour event that takes place simultaneously at hundreds of locations around the world, with teams creating games on a pre-determined theme. The Rensselaer Game Development Club took part in the Albany Jam through the IGDA Albany Chapter at SUNY Albany. This 2013 theme was “heartbeat.”

-Red Candy Games, founded by Julian Volyn, Class of 2011, released “Tin Man Can,” through the App Store. Tin Man Can is the followup to Red Candy’s 2011 Xbox Live Indie Game ”Tic”.

-Electronic Arts MFA alumni Paolo Pedercini received the Grand Jury Award at IndieCade 2012, the International Festival for Independant Games, for “Unmanned”, an experimental game about a day in the life of a drone pilot.

The GSAS program was launched in the fall of 2007 to provide comprehensive understanding of interactive digital media, a balance of disciplinary competencies, and the mastery of a self-defined set of interrelated disciplinary challenges at the nation’s oldest technical institute. Six years in, they’re hitting the mark.

Students in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) program labor over the course of an entire academic year (and sometimes longer) to build the video games showcased at the annual GameFest at Rensselaer. Every year, it seems, student-designed games break new ground for GameFest, introducing emerging technologies like augmented reality, real-world applications in education, and sophistication that is—frankly—wrecking the curve for the rest of us.

Building these games is not without intense hours of planning, writing code, and trouble-shooting. As likely as not, students will be putting the finishing touches on the entries for GameFest 2012 right up until the day of expo on Saturday, April 28.

It’s down to the wire suspense. Which is great for cinema, but not necessarily for blogging.

The full list of entries and their descriptions is still forthcoming, as is a video of this year’s student-created games. (The above video is from the 2011 GameFest). But here’s what Rensselaer professors and GSAS co-directors Lee Sheldon and Ben Chang have to say about the event:

Here’s a brief list of things you can expect to see: educational Kinect games; new cutting-edge realtime rendering techniques that’ll knock your socks off; new takes on rhythm and music games; Greek mythology, Paul Revere’s Ride, mobile games about moustaches; brain-control interfaces (that’s right, there’ll be a game you play with the power of your mind); the moral choices of the afterlife; one naval strategy game with realistically modeled battleships and another with fantastical undersea creatures; multiplayer networked games; and a vibrantly colored mashup of rollerblading, 90′s ‘zine culture, and the dangers of mobile casual game addiction.

This year’s GameFest is bigger than ever, with both Champlain College and Rochester Institute of Technology submitting entries into the annual competition sponsored by Vicarious Visions, founded by Rensselaer alumni Karthik Bala, and his brother Guha Bala. Champlain will be showcasing nine games, RIT will be showcasing five, and Rensselaer will have a total of 27 games on the floor of the Armory, for a total of 41 games, 15 of which will be entered into a juried competition.

Here also is a schedule of the day’s events:

• 10 a.m.-1 p.m., The Armory – Judging and open viewing
• 2:30-3:30 p.m., The Biotech Auditorium – Keynote speaker, Richard Vogel
• 3:30-4:30 p.m., The Biotech Auditorium – Game Industry Panel discussion
• 4:30-5:30 p.m., The Biotech Auditorium – Student Award Presentation

Keynote speaker Richard Vogel is the executive producer of Star Wars: The Old Republic, a production of LucasArts and BioWare/Electronic Arts. He will be joined for the panel discussion, following his keynote address, by Frank Lantz of Zynga New York, Jennifer O’Neal of Vicarious Visions/Activision, Richard Rouse of Paranoid Productions/UbiSoft, and Rensselaer graduate Tobi Saulnier, founder of 1st Playable Productions.

Broken Breakout from lawson shawn on Vimeo.

Word recently reached the street that Rensselaer is making a contribution to Saratoga First Night 2012 in signature techie style with the “Hands-off Arcade,” a collection of retro games retooled for the Microsoft Kinect gaming hardware. Shawn Lawson, an associate professor of arts and faculty member in the Rensselaer Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program, said all the games will obey the hands-free theme:

There’s no remote, no joystick, no nothing. It’s just the person the body, hands free interactive games experiences.

Lawson and collaborators Ben Chang (associate professor of arts and GSAS co-director) and Silvia Ruzanka, artist and RPI lecturer, debuted one of the games – Broken Breakout – during the Gamefest, the annual showcase of student-designed games hosted at Rensselaer. The game is a Kinect twist on the classic “Breakout.” That’s a video of Broken Breakout at the top of this post. Here’s how it’s explained by its creators:

While the interface for the original game consisted of a small knob, here one plays through the movement of the whole body. Cascading balls pour out of the bricks, as they are broken, filling up the screen and quickly overwhelming the original rules and purpose of the game. New interactions emerge as the player wades through the piles of rainbow-hued debris, scooping and pushing masses around.

Curious about how you build a video game, I asked Lawson a little bit about went into the process. In the case of the Hands-off Arcade, Lawson said the process is part creation and part integration.

We come up with the idea – how the game will work, how it will look, how it will sound, how it will interact with Kinect – that’s all built from scratch. But a lot of the things that we use aren’t build from scratch – the graphics drawing engine, the physics engine, OpenNI and NITE (a natural user interfaces)- all of these components are open source drivers and libraries that we use as pieces in a game that we design.

In other words, the vision for the game is creation, but the mechanics integrates existing software drivers and libraries – packaged sections of computer code that are available for all the world to use in performing specific tasks.

For example, the games employ a “physics engine” which is a section of software that determines how virtual objects will interact (when a ball collides with an object, will it bounce away, or break the object into pieces?). Similarly a “graphics engine” allows the designers to input information about graphic elements.

Our graphics Engine – OpenGL – talks directly to the hardware of the graphics card. When you say, ‘I need to draw a polygon here,’ you say ‘here’s the information about a polygon, these are the locations for the vertices, this is the style, this is the texture, here’s where the camera is, focal length of the camera, go draw this for me and put it here on the screen.’

The team have one other game  – Missle Command – in the bag, and are working on a few others. One game they are building, at the request of the Saratoga Arts, is a spinoff of a website interface “B-Flat.” The original website interface allowed users to mix video snippets of performances in the key of b-flat major to create an entirely new composition. The new version “B-Flat 2.0,” will fit the hands-free theme.

Lawson said the team hope the games they are creating for Hands-off Arcade are ”as much art project as video game.”

They’re kind of subversive in that we’re not really adhering to cannonical game play and themes: there’s no high score list, there’s no saving the princess. We’re sort of using a gaming format to explore ideas, artistic themes, or finding out what you can do.

The end result may not appeal to hard-core gamers, but it does have the makings of a good time on a fun night.

Having watched a lot of people play these things, they kind of understand that this is just here to be an experience – there’s no anxiety of ‘I’m terrible at this game,’ because you can’t really win, you can’t really lose. … It’s just to play and have fun.

This spring, Rensselaer saw the first full class of students in its Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) program (20 students) cross the dais and take their degree. It’s a milestone worth celebrating and, as if on cue, GSAS has been generating a buzz of activity of late.

Today, the Berkshire Eagle reports that RedCandy Games, founded by Rensselaer student Julian Volyn, has just released its first video game, Tic, on XBOX Live Indie Marketplace. The article focuses on Justin Burdick, a Rensselaer graduate, and Volyn’s former RPI roommate, who contributed to the graphics of the game (Rensselaer students Zach Lynn, Trevor Zettersten, Ivy Kwan, Jeff Danis, Evan Weinberg were also on the team that created the game).

Burdick was on the student team that created Tic (pictured above) and Yamada Box Legend, the top two prize winners at this year’s GameFest.

Last week, Lee Sheldon, co-director of the GSAS program and a professor of language, literature and communication, released a new book on the lessons game design can lend to education. The Multiplayer Classroom, Designing Coursework as a Game lays out a classroom based on principles of game design created to motivate and lead players through the game. Students in the “multiplayer classroom” solve “quests,” work in “guilds,” and rack up “experience points” (which are translated to a grade) as the semester progresses.

It’s more than just theory, Sheldon runs his own multiplayer classroom in his work as a professor at Rensselaer, and says that the results speak for themselves.

“The average class grade went from a C to a B, using the same materials. Attendance is now near perfect. People come early and work – even if they don’t have an assignment – on various quests before the class.”

GSAS will keep rocking through the summer as Rensselaer hosts high school students in a two-week residential enrichment program on the fundamentals of video game creation. Students in the program learn about the technical and creative sides of games, and then have a chance to brainstorm game ideas and ultimately, design their own game from start to finish.

As a non-gamer, I have a feeling that what impressed me most about GameFest 7.0 is not what impressed the judges. I, who gave up video games with Ms. Pac-Man, was wow-ed by “Infinity Simulator,” a student-designed game in which players are suspended in a sort of trapeze harness (and equipped with virtual reality glasses) that senses their pitching and rolling movements and shifts the scene accordingly.

Ever fly in your dreams? This game is probably as close as you’ll get short of paragliding. In a videotaped demo run-through, developer Yehuda Duenas soars above a tropical island – the virtual world duly revolving in time with his in-harness somersaults – and then flies through a palm forest. Interestingly, the palm fronds themselves seem to dissolve just as he would smack into them.

Infinity Simulator was one of 17 games on display at today’s GameFest, an annual showcase of student work from Rensselaer’s Games and Simulation Arts & Sciences program, which was recently ranked 5th in the nation among game design programs. A panel of judges from Vicarious Visions, the Troy-based company of Guitar Hero fame that was founded by Rensselaer alums, was on hand for a more knowledgeable assessment than “ewww …cool!”

The judges – who ranked games based on visual art, audio, engineering (programming), and game design – awarded prizes to the top five games. Let’s pause here for congratulations to (in order from first to fifth prize):

Legend of Vim – Mark Mendelson, Andrew Dolce, Michael Goddard, Eric Li, Ivy Kwan, and Alex Tabor-Moore
Meteor Dawn – Justin White
Factory of Steam – Michael Andryauskas, Nicholas Coppola, Christopher Dipastina, Paul Dipastina, William Lassen, Yuting Lian
Mariana – Nate Stedman
Battle Force 4 – Byron Hulcher, Peter Ingulli, Lauren Sacks, Josh Safran, Noah Scnapp

The games were set up in a theater at EMPAC. Above a cluster of gaming stations, a movie theater-sized screen flashed a looping 18-minute video montage of games, adding to the air of professional polish at the event. The videos embedded in this post are taken from that montage.

During the festival, visitors took a turn at the joystick, or – in the case of “Boogey Man” – the pillow. “Bogey Man” another non-traditional video game, was designed as therapy for kids who are afraid of monsters in the dark.

The game uses facial tracking technology and a bright yellow pillow to help kids vanquish their monsters. Players look at the monsters on-screen and then press the pillow to launch a virtual pillow at the monster, striking and dissolving them.

The video you see of Mariana is one of a kind, as one of the key features of the game is that it’s generated in real-time, meaning no two play-throughs are alike.

Many of the games were designed by teams of students, pairing talents – students with arts experience working with those who have more cognitive science or computer science skills – to improve the finished product, said Marc DeStefano, chair of the program. “Gaming is the ultimate disciplinary field,” Destefano said. “It just brings every field of study together to create these experiences.”
  
There were traditional “slash and hack” games on display, but even they seem determined to push the boundaries on gaming. Noah Schnapp, a developer of Battle Force 4, said his team’s game uses 3D isometric graphics to give a player two unusual views on his position within the game – one from a 45-degree angle above the player and one from behind. Other games combine music with graphics – in Drummer Singer Pianoman, musician players defeat a video virus by manipulating their characters with beats, pitch, and note.

Destefano said next year’s GameFest will be an even more ambitious assemblage as new faculty help to expand Rensselaer’s prestigious Games and Simulation Arts & Science program.