Breaking into the video game design industry might seem like a distant dream for many, but Tufts senior Cobin Dopkeen, juniors Gilad Gray and Anit Das and School of the Museum of Fine Arts junior Nadia Rodriguez (who is spending this academic year studying at Tufts) are closer than ever to doing just that, thanks to their success in Microsoft's U.S. Imagine Cup competition.
Their team, officially called Team AwesomeSauce, has advanced to the final round of the cup with its "Nanobots" game. The final round of the competition will take place in Washington, D.C. next week. The team is mentored by Ming Chow (E '02), who is a lecturer in the computer science department.
The Microsoft U.S. Imagine Cup is a biannual competition and has categories in software design, game design, digital media, information technology (IT) and embedded design. The theme of this Imagine Cup is "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems," according to the competition's Web site.
Contestants in the game design category had to create a game that addressed the theme and had to use a Microsoft−developed set of software tools to create it.
"[The software contest competitors] are actually developing tools to help people," Das said.
In the game, players control one of the titular nanobots and fight off bacteria and viruses by shooting them with things like pills, syringes and antibacterial spray.
The "Nanobots" team chose to work with Microsoft XNA (which stands for "Not Acronymed") Game Studio 3.0. XNA Game Studio allows users to create games for PCs, Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console and the Zune MP3 player.
Developers using XNA Game Studio can post their games for sale on Microsoft's Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace.
The group first heard of the Imagine Cup in Chow's Introduction to Game Development course when two representatives from Microsoft's New England Research & Development Center (NERD) spoke to the class. "They showed us how easy the platform XNA is to program in to make games on the Xbox [360], PC or Zune," Das said. "And then they told us about the competition, and we were super psyched because we've always wanted to make a console game."
Gray and Dopkeen are currently in a directed study in game design under Chow. Both took Chow's Introduction to Game Development as an Experimental College class, while Das and Rodriguez are currently enrolled in the class' first semester as a full computer science class.
The directed study has five students who were originally going to make a game on their own, but they then realized that Imagine Cup's timeframe coincided perfectly with their semester schedule. Imagine Cup rules limit each team to only four members, however, so the class had to split up into multiple teams. Gray and Dopkeen drew Das and Rodriguez into their team to help create the game.
The other team did not make it to the final round but is still working on a game, according to Gray. It is a real−time strategy game pitting environmentalists against industrialists in a battle to control the game's map.
"We wanted to do something more fast−paced than what they were doing," Dopkeen said of the other game. The group looked at the popular modification of "WarCraft III" (2002), "Defense of the Ancients," in which players control just one character while fighting hordes of weaker enemies.
"To fit with the [Imagine Cup] theme, it would have to be a lot more peace[ful]," Das said. With that in mind, the "Nanobots" game was born.
"You're controlling this nanobot, which is a nano−scale robot inside the human body in various parts of the body," Gray said.
The gameplay of "Nanobots" will be familiar to anyone who has played the Xbox hit "Geometry Wars" (2005) or the arcade classic "Asteroids" (1979). "‘Geometry Wars' was a huge influence," Gray said.
"We have two main modes in our game," Das said. "There's a story mode, where you're going through various parts of the human body and so there's a nose level that you start out in and you're just fighting basic things. Then there's a lung level where you're fighting pneumonia. There's a bowels level where you're trying to fight off a tapeworm. There's a heart transplant level where you're trying to fight infection so the transplant doesn't get rejected."
The game also has a four−player multiplayer mode featuring competitive gaming staples like capture−the−flag mode, deathmatch and a survival mode in which players have to fight off never−ending hordes of enemies while competing against each other for a high score. Players can also play through the story mode alone or with up to four players.
"A girl I talked to yesterday who is a sociology major thought it was interesting that this game, while it was shooting and stuff, was training people to fight medical [disease] and not hurt people," Das said.
Although they do not know exactly what their competitors will bring to the table, the team members expect that the games won't be stereotypically violent, as entries were required to have content that would be roughly equivalent to a game rated "E" for Everyone by the Electronic Software Ratings Board, the video game ratings body.
"Our original idea of fighting hordes of enemies was like: ‘That's pretty violent,' and then we were like ‘Oh, wait, let's make it medicine or bacteria, because no one likes them, they're disease,'" Gray said.
"We played it pretty loose with the theme, but it worked out, apparently," Das said.
The stipulation that the game be appropriate for children forced the group to get creative with the names of the nanobots' weapons. "We came up with all the weapon names two hours before we submitted the game," Dopkeen said.
"It was like: machine gun, shotgun and grenade launcher, and we were like: ‘hold on — pill shooter, shot [as in syringe] gun, it's a pun, Dr. Molotov's Cocktail,' which is kind of iffy, but it's a pretty good pun," Gray said.
The team has sunk quite a few late nights into "Nanobots." "We had five weeks from figuring out what we wanted to do, learning the platform and how to code the game and then submitting a demo," Das said.
"They were only informed about it at the end of January, and they had to deliver a product by March 15," Chow said. "It's been a fabulous experience for them, but the work they have done during that short duration has been absolutely phenomenal."
The group said some of the best moments of the development process were when they realized they were having fun playing their game. "At some point in our de−bugging, before we made the demo, we discovered that our game was actually really fun to play," Das said.
"One night I remember, it was Tuesday. We were working really hard … and the demo [for that phase of the competition] was due the following Sunday. It got to 2 a.m. and we stopped working and kept playing, and it was really fun, and we were like, ‘Wow, this is awesome,'" Gray added.
The group members praised the XNA tools with streamlining the development process.
"We learned and put this game together in five weeks, we didn't work with this stuff before, and it's the biggest project we've ever worked on," Das said.
The group has 11 days before heading to Washington, D.C. to show the full game at the finals. Twenty teams out of about 3,500 initial entrants are partaking in the finals, according to Gray. The top three teams get prizes of $8,000, $4,000 and $3,000, for first, second and third place, respectively.
Even if they do not win, the team's members believe they cannot put a price on the experience they've gained from making the game and going as far as they did.
The team members all hope to go into game design professionally after graduation. "That's a big reason why we're doing this," Gray said.
"What they have done has been absolutely the highlight of my semester," Chow said.
Though they are making a game, rather than a "serious" program, the team members insist that it has tested their skills as much as developing any other program would have. "It looks kind of really silly and fun, but it's actually pushed everything we've learned in our comp sci classes to a good degree," Das said.
Rodriguez, who is designing the art aspects of the game, also hopes to move into the creative side of the video game industry.
Rodriguez heard about the Imagine Cup competition from Chow while in Chow's Intro to Game Development course and decided to join Team AwesomeSauce.
"Basically, it's been more of a learning experience in terms of learning how to produce a video game," Rodriguez said. "I learned a lot about having to just figure out the different sprites [2−D animations or images] that are needed in terms of video game making and just trying to figure out how we're going to implement each different thing."
Rodriguez added that the group is currently implementing three different images for the nanobots depending on the amount of damage the nanobot has taken.
"Way back when I was little, I was very fond of the old retro games, and that's basically one of the things that inspired me — playing games like ‘Super Mario Bros.' (1986) and seeing the art of video games ... made me want to create characters and [see] them [put] into the videogames that people like my other teammates would be coding," Rodriguez said. "I had always been interested in art, but I had always wanted to get into the game design field as well, so I figured, what better way have a cake and eat it too?"
"A lot of the technical work and starting of the story begins with storyboards and things that I've done through my classes in animation," Rodriguez said "Basically, [ideally], I would be doing a lot of environmental concepts and sketches and a lot of the pre−production artwork that you see when they release art books of video games."
Rodriguez cited the games "Bioshock" (2007) and "Assassin's Creed" (2007) as some recent games that stood out to her for their exceptional environmental design. "Bioshock" is set in an art−deco inspired underwater city, while "Assassin's Creed" takes place in the holy land during the crusades.
"I hope that it sends me some [places] in the future, because it's one of those things where we found out that we were going to D.C. and we all immediately cheered, because its something you can put onto your applications and immediately be able to wow your prospects," Rodriguez said.
Even if they don't win the competition, the "Nanobots" team plans to finish the game in its spare time over the summer — Xbox 360 owners with a taste for some frantic, medically−themed action should keep a lookout.
