I will (hopefully) graduate Full Sail in 253 days.
59.8%
SlashdotSo E3 came around and the fellows at 3DRealms had nothing to show for their long awaited title Duke Nukem forever. So they faked it.
They could of at least shown something, the original trailers from ten years ago look better than this steaming pile. Looks like someone whipped this up in flash a few hours before the conference.
(This is a repost of a news article from Full-Sail’s Propeller Website)
The tale of Mr. Apple Head
What happens when you shut 16 Game Development students in a room for 24 hours with plenty of computers and ask them to create a game? Apparently, the answer is: Mr. Apple Head, a working game about a humanoid-apple looking for his body parts.
That’s what came of a recent experiment, sponsored by the Game Development department. The 24-hour creative exercise was inspired by the experiments of Jenova Chen, creative director and co-founder of thatgamecompany, the makers of flOw. (Newcomer Chen was propelled into the game industry spotlight after winning the International Game Festival Student Showcase in 2006, and after leaving the development team of Spore to found his own successful company in 2007.)
“They’ve done a lot of those game play experiments where they see what happens in 24 hours,” said Course Director Keyvan Acosta, the Game Development faculty member who organized the event.
Acosta and some of the students call this type of experiment a “play mine,” since the participants are metaphorically “mining for fun.”
You might think that volunteering to pull an all-nighter (a 24-hour all-nighter) wouldn’t be something that students in an already-challenging program would relish. However, Acosta and the students who participated beg to differ. “It’s actually incredibly fun,” explained Acosta.
Play Mine Rules: You Make Them
The world of Mr. Apple Head takes place on a playground, where the hapless Frankenstein-like apple is roaming a playground looking for his arms and legs. In this game, the babies on the playground are the bad guys.
So how did they produce the game in 24 hours? They weren’t assigned to create it; Mr. Apple Head simply emerged.
“You start with a loose form, and you find form,” said Acosta, who described himself as the go-to person for assistance. “They organize themselves – I help by giving them a little bit of structure.”
The students chose where on the team they wanted to participate – such as designing the graphics (art), coding (programming) or organizing and managing (production). “One of the guys that did the art – the reason he did the art was he’s always programming. He just wanted to really see himself in it,” said Acosta. “He [won’t] have an opportunity in the whole degree to [try his hand at art]. He wanted to do something completely different.”
The Benefits of Experimenting with Play
According to Acosta and Program Director Rob Catto, this type of creative exercise has several benefits.
“One of the things we’re finding in the industry is that studios are looking for people that do outside stuff outside the realm of their projects,” said Game Development Program Director Rob Catto.
Acosta said it also gives students experience that they can’t get in class. “The rules that emerge are similar to what happens in the industry – what we teach in the class, but they happen [in an experiment] out of necessity,” said Acosta. “It’s a way for them to see that the training is an actual efficient method.”
“One of the things that I was striving for was for them to observe themselves – what it is that they do when a grade’s not attached to something and how many of those lessons that they’ve learned (good habits and bad habits) in the classroom.”
Alas, you probably won’t find Mr. Apple Head available for download anytime soon. Another rule of the play mine is that it is finite.
“When it ends, it ends – that’s the end of the life of that project. We want each activity to have closure,” said Acosta. Meanwhile, the play mine will go on, in different forms.
“It’s an umbrella for different activities that hopefully will create student participation, student awareness, competition and experimentation.”
- Christine Baker
Back from a restful holiday, which involved my flying out to the middle of nowhere in order to get as far away from my studies as possible, and then doing nothing whatsover that has anything in common with programming or even games at all. Over the course of the week I perhaps played an hour or two on my Nintendo DS. It started innocently enough, I’ve been playing through Professor Layton, an odd sort of “game” which wraps up a series of puzzles into bite-sized chunks. I had just finished on particular puzzle and I handed the unit to my dad and asked him to solve it, mostly as a sort of challenge to him. I never saw my DS again, and ended up having to buy another DS and copy of the game in order to get mine back at the end of the week.
I’d also like to mention the new legitimate use for devices like the M3 or similar. Without these pirate devices, or presumably some fabled hardware that Nintendo keeps locked in an underground vault, there is no way for an end user to move save data from one DS cartridge to another, a feat I accomplished with some swearing and an application called Savsender, run on my M3 evil pirate device.
Also was on the adgenda was training my mom on the use of her adorable iPod nano. Her first MP3 player, not that iPods are difficult to use. It seems that both my parents aren’t the sort of technology-fearing luddites I had previously thought, *sniff* I’m so proud.
I’m pleased to announce that Rayzer has mostly gone gold. “Gold” of course is simply for the sake of the class which is drawing to a close. We have all decided that the game is not done, not by a long shot. Here, for now, are a couple of screenshots of Rayzer to show of what we accomplished, I hope to have a downloadable version for all of you soon.
Screenshots after the break.
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