Welcome to SIP! – 6/1/12
Members of Recruits discuss pre-production with Walt Yarbrough. From left to right: Alex Jersey, Jim McCarthy, Steve Everitt and Yarbrough.
Welcome to MassDiGI’s 2012 Summer Innovation Program Blog! We’ll be working throughout the summer to bring you regular updates from our game development projects as well as glimpses into the work of the project teams as they progress. Our goal is to shine a light on the game development process and share our experiences. Periodically, we’ll also have insights written by the team members themselves and the game industry mentors who guide them. But first, a little background.
The Summer Innovation Program, or SIP, was created to give college students an opportunity to spend 11 weeks immersed in a mentored game development environment. Essentially, SIP is a full-time, paid summer internship at a game development studio. When complete each student will be better prepared than ever enter the workforce or become an entrepreneur. SIP is underwritten by Becker College and an array of corporate supporters.
The 18 SIP students come from 9 different colleges and universities including RPI, Champlain, WPI, Northeastern, Mt. Holyoke, Berklee, Mt. Ida, Becker and Springfield. They are organized into four project teams, tasked with shipping the different games and assigned game industry mentors. Unlike most course-based exercises, the risk of failure and success weighs on every decision. The students must execute on their visions but only so long as they work together as a team. There are also a couple of student volunteers around SIP including one from Emerson.
The four game development projects are Energy Drive, Recruits, Nanoswarm, and On Call. Energy Drive is a social casual game in which the player creates clean energy sources for a city whose pollution has become a problem. It plays like a cross between Sim City and Farmville. Recruits is like Alien Swarm and XCOM, with a focus on narrative, customizable squads, and permanent death of your troops. Nanoswarm is an iOS puzzle game where the player controls living iron filings by pinching and expanding them with their hands. And, finally, On Call is an asynchronous, multiplayer version of Diner Dash. It is focused on facilitating communication between medical students and nursing students.
Along the way, we will be sharing their trials and tribulations on the way to the final ship date.
My name is Oleg Brodskiy. I am a student at Binghamton University. As MassDiGI’s volunteer summer intern, I’ll be posting regularly, so please stay tuned!
