Summer in the city (#gamedev style) – 5/8/13

Published on Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Summer in the city (#gamedev style)

Blog by Tim Loew, Executive Director, MassDiGI

It is that time of year again! MassDiGI’s 2013 Summer Innovation Program (SIP) is just around the corner. Beginning on May 21st, 22 students representing 10 colleges and universities – Northeastern, Berklee, UMass Lowell, WPI, Becker, Hampshire, RISD, Champlain, RPI and Union – will join us in the game lab on Becker’s campus in Worcester for what is the most immersive (and fun) game development internship program in the region.

This year, for the 22 positions, we received 84 eligible applications from students, both undergraduate and graduate, representing 24 colleges and universities. That’s an increase of 29 applications over last year. Needless to say, this is a very competitive program and selecting participants from such a high-achieving, talented applicant pool was a challenge.

The 7 women and 15 men taking part in SIP can expect, to paraphrase one of last year’s participants, “one of the best, if not the best, learning experiences you’ll have.” With support from veteran game industry staff, mentors, entrepreneurs and advisors, the students will be working on 4 great team projects. The projects are: Wobbles (winner of the best entertainment game – student category at this year’s Game Challenge), a collaborative project with NeuroScouting, a collaborative project with the Indie Game Collective and a collaborative project with Zeebi Lab (runner-up for the Overdriver.com best online game (serious) at this year’s Game Challenge). We think this mixture of projects will be really exciting for all the student artists, programmers, designers and producers.

In addition to these great projects, students, who receive a stipend as well as free residence hall housing courtesy of Becker, will have the opportunity to visit area game development studios, attend game industry meet-ups and events.

From time to time during the course of the summer, SIP teams will be blogging about their projects, business models, technology challenges, design choices, art styles, team dynamics, mentor sessions etc. so keep an eye out for some cool posts. And like last year, we’ll be holding an Open House in early August where teams will demo their work. Follow us on Twitter @MassDiGI or like us at FB/massdigi for updates all summer long!

5/18/13 – Update – A student from UMass Lowell received great news and will not be in SIP this summer. Therefore, in the program at this time there will be 21 students representing 9 colleges and universities.