Flashpoint students win Game Design Challenge

I’m thrilled to share with you that two students from the Game Development program at Flashpoint are featured as winners in a recent Game Design Challenge held by one of the industry’s most important websites. First year student Emily Greenquist won as Best Entry, and Terumi Tamaki won an honorable mention. Follow the links to check out the full details!

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/792/results_from_game_design_.php

From the article:

“Results from Game Design Challenge: Literary Inspirations

We have hundreds, even thousands, of years of literature to draw from -- yet so little of it has been used for source material for games. Early next year, Electronic Arts will release Dante's Inferno, a very loose adaptation of part of Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century.

While it's debatable how respectful the game's content is to the original source material, it's true that the works of the past are a resource that could be tapped much more effectively in the creation of gameworlds.

Game Career Guide challenged its readers to adapt a piece of literature -- contemporary, medieval, or somewhere in between -- into a game. It could be in any genre of literature or gaming -- the core concept is how compellingly you turn it into a game idea. How will you adapt from one medium to the other? What will you cut? What will you keep? What will you change, and what will stay the same?

Winning entries effectively translated literary works into game narratives, while also keeping in mind the medium's inherent tropes and limitations.

What follows are the best and most original entries we received. Here are our top picks: “


Best Entries:

Emily Greenquist, Student, Flashpoint Academy (Year One Student)

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Greenquist takes a complex story and weaves it into a solid game concept. The Picture of Dorian Gray, as a horror-themed RPG, puts players in the role of an amoral protagonist who must eventually face the consequences of his actions. Though the experience would be a largely passive one for the player, the depth in narrative promises a rich payoff. “

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/792/results_from_game_design_.php?page=4


Honorable Mention:

Terumi Tamaki, Romeo and Juliet: Happily Ever After (Year Two Student)

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/792/results_from_game_design_.php?page=9

No longer patent pending!

After many years under review, one of my recent inventions, the Time Market Grid Interface, has recently been granted approval by the U.S. patent office!

You can look up patent 7,574,388 on uspto.gov, or check out this quick third-party web link:

http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/7574388.html

I invented this interface and technology for a Chicago company called Trading Technologies...and I have more trading technology inventions up my sleeve. As a game developer, I am keenly interested in optimizing the user experience in real-time interactive media -- so the challenges of developing, producing, and programming games is strongly connected to issues in making great software used by electronic traders in exchanges around the world.