Back in April, DePaul’s Game Designer in Residence Alex Seropian put out a call for applications to join the DePaul Game Elites development team. The goal was to produce a commercial game that would be entered into the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. 15 DePaul students were chosen, and they worked for six solid months, through the summer and continuing over fall quarter. The result is Devil’s Tuning Fork, and it’s now available for download on their site DevilsTuningFork.com Progress continues on polishing and bug crunching, so your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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March 9-13, 2010 in San Francisco

The DePaul Game Development program will be back again at the Game Developers Conference, the largest game industry and education event of the year, with a larger booth and more of just about everything. If you’d like to find out about our program you’ll be able to meet with faculty, industry advisor board members, students and alumni, and admissions staff. You can also play games created by DePaul students and meet the creators.

Come back for updates on more DePaul Game Dev GDC events as it approaches.

Matt has spent the last year working with Professor Jose Zagal doing videogame research. Their paper, “Challenges for Success in Stereo Gaming: A Virtual Boy Case Study”, explores some of the challenges that must be overcome for mass-adoption of stereoscopic 3D videogame systems.
Nintendo’s Virtual Boy platform, originally released in 1995, was the first portable gaming console capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D images. It was a commercial failure. Matt’s research explores the reasons for this failure as means for examining and understanding the challenges that exciting upcoming technologies such as volumetric displays and 3D flat panel displays will have to address if they wish to succeed.

Sebastian Gosztyla knows about dreams; he was born in Bielsk-Biala, Poland. When he moved to the United States at 10, he learned how to play video games even though he didn’t speak English. Though Gosztyla was offered scholarships at other schools, he decided to study at DePaul University’s Game Development program. Despite the financial struggle; he chose to pursue his vision. “I feel extremely honored and thrilled to receive this award. Efforts such as the Randy Pausch Scholarship help to change the perception of education in video games from a silly day dream to a recognized degree. It’s a relief to know that there are people out there who support the dreams of students like myself,” says Gosztyla.

Read the full text of the Randy Pausch Scholarship announcement.

Visiting Lecture by Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr

3:10pm Wednesday, June 3rd Room 222

Designing good co-op games is an important topic in today’s video game industry. When interviewing kids ages 8-12, we found that over 89% of the kids interviewed play games with their friends or family at home or at their friends’ home. Most new games, such as Left for Dead and Resident Evil 5, have an added a co-op component to their game play. While in the previous years, co-op game play was considered as a secondary game mechanic, now games are designed with co-op components from the very start of the design process.

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Patrick Curry contemplates Super Mario Bros.

Patrick Curry, Creative Director at Wideload Games and Game Design Lecturer in DePaul’s Game Dev program, is included in the new book Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning, a collection of essays on games by game developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers. The book is available for free download or paper purchase. Patrick’s chapter examines Super Mario Bros., one of his super all-time favorite games. The book’s goal is to “help develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience.”

Dan Loane’s postmortem essay about the development process of Toon Doom, a UT3 mod created in Patrick Curry’s Game Mod Workshop course, has been published on the Game Career Guide site. It’s a very thorough analysis of an excellent mod. The Toon Doom mod team also included Tony Perkins, Erik Spitzer, Irvin Chavira, Kevin Zuhn, Andrew Sallwasser, and Greg Kruse. Direct link to the article.

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Alex Seropian discusses game development education and his objectives as Game Designer in Residence

Alex Seropian, creator of the enormously successful Halo computer game franchise, will become DePaul University’s second Game Designer in Residence this spring. He will join computer game industry executives Ed Keenan and Bill Muehl as new additions to the game development faculty of DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) expanding an already impressive roster of industry professionals working in the program.

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