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.

Day in the life of a game programmer, artist and designer

In describing "what it's really like out there" I find that students just starting out in our program at Flashpoint Academy are frequently skeptical of everything faculty conveys to them about the realities of working as a game developer today (even with our accumulated 70 years of working in the field).

Industry visitors from nearby studios definitely help us out in this regard, but this article provides some really great examples of experiences by a few developers: a programmer, an artist, and a designer really do a nice job of fleshing out a typical day.

Here's the article from CareerGameGuide.com you should check out!

Here's the start of the article:

"Programmer

8:45 AM I arrive at work and head to my office. At High Moon Studios, most programmers don't actually work in their offices. We work in open space areas, sitting next to designers, artists, and animators. My office is where I drop my stuff, check my email, and make phone calls. I share a large office with five other people, but only spend about 30 minutes a day in there so we are rarely there at the same time."

Game development student grads from Flashpoint Academy featured in College Magazine

From the article:

"Just about every person of our generation has gone through at least one phase of obsession with video games, and can relate to the way a player gets wrapped up in that interactive experience. And how many kids dream of making these games, only to “grow out of it”? Well, in a time when video games are more popular than ever, among kids, college students and even elderly people (Nintendo Wii has hit retirement homes, believe it or not), there’s more opportunity than ever to pursue a career in video game development—which is exactly what two Chicago-area students are doing.

Justin C. Moore and Joshua Hernandez are recent graduates of the Flashpoint Academy in Chicago, IL, where they met and collaborated on designing a game that can now be found on Xbox Live Marketplace and soon on the iPhone. Moore, who studied game design, says he heard of Flashpoint Academy at just the right time. “I got a flier in the mail; it was really fortuitous, as I was unemployed for the summer of 2007 and didn’t know what I was gonna be doing in the fall,” says Moore. After completing his undergraduate degree at MIT a few years ago, Moore knew he wanted to pursue his hobby of programming, and Flashpoint was the perfect place to learn his trade."

Read More About Game Development Graduates from Flashpoint Academy!

Upping Your Game's Usability

I found this recent article from Gamasutra.com to be very useful. In today's world "user interface" and "human-computer interactive" (HCI) are keys to the either success or failure of interactive entertainment products out there. It's largely about making things clear, simple -- and complementing our typical approach as humans in a) controlling our environment and b) learning more about our environment to control it more efficiently.

Check out this excerpt:

"Upping Your Game's Usability

A common gripe I hear from developers is that a game has a really great concept or aesthetic, but that the user interface (UI) is lousy. Games that are hard to control or that mystify users by not providing useful or sufficient feedback are pretty damn frustrating to play. This can translate into worse sales, so it's worthwhile for game developers to really spend a lot of time thinking about a game's UI."

Web link to full article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4110/upping_your_games_usability.php