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DigiPen students launch multiplayer crossover bumper brawl, Ball-Stars
DigiPen Ball-Stars has a lot of DigiPen in it.DigiPen Institute of Technology students Corey Kay, Curtis McCoy, Jason Meisel, and Sean Reilly have banded together to release Barry's Magical Escape: DigiPen Ball-Stars Edition, a freeware indie crossover title for PC inspired by Mario Party's Bumper Balls minigame. (Unfortunately, Luigi isn't a playable character here, so you can't win by doing nothing.)Barry's Magical Escape offers a motley collection of characters and backdrops from many DigiPen standouts, including the survival racer Nitronic Rush, stealth-action game Deity and Portal's predecessor, Narbacular Drop. As in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series, random items drop throughout each battle, and each successful strike increases an enemy's bounce recoil, leading to some wildly chaotic possibilities. Be prepared to lose friendships over this one.Barry's Magical Escape supports up to eight simultaneous players in local and online multiplayer matches.%Gallery-186737%
Arcade survival racer Distance closing in on Kickstarter finish line
Seattle-based Refract Studios updated the Kickstarter page with new gameplay footage for its racing game project Distance, a spiritual successor to the team's student project while attending DigiPen, Nitronic Rush. With DigiPen owning the rights to Nitronic Rush, Refract Studios (a fraction of the Nitronic Rush team) took to Kickstarter to fund its ambitions with a similar "survival racing" game in Distance.According to the project's description, "You control a unique car that allows you to boost, jump, rotate, and even fly through a chaotic and twisted city." The game's world is said to have a "mysterious history," placing a heavy focus on exploration in the city's bizarre environment in addition to its level editor and multiplayer modes.Distance is in development for PC, Mac and Linux, with the only videos available labeled as pre-alpha footage. The Kickstarter project is currently sitting at almost $85,000 in funding with five days left before the team hopes to reach its $125,000 goal.
This year's PAX 10: JS Joust, Offspring Fling!, Puzzlejuice and more
The PAX 10, an illustrious group of indie games chosen annually to be spotlighted during PAX Prime in Seattle, have been selected. This year's rarified group include the likes of Johann Sebastian Joust, Offspring Fling! – a game we highlighted in length on the Super Joystiq Podcast – and hypnotic iOS darling Puzzlejuice.Other lesser-known titles include the latest from Cipher Prime, the studio behind Auditorium and Fractal, a Steam title called Splice, and puzzle games Containment: The Zombie Puzzler and The Bridge. Puzzle-platformer The Swapper is also represented, along with DigiPen's stealth-action game Deity and Catch-22. Turtle Sandbox's action-strategy hybrid Cannon Brawl rounds out the list of ten.All PAX 10 titles will be featured in their own special area at this year's PAX Prime, which goes down August 31 through September 2 in downtown Seattle, WA.
Nitronic Rush: a 'survival driving' game by DigiPen students
Skyrim? Pssh, forget that noise, November 11 is all about Nitronic Rush now. A "survival driving" game for the PC, Nitronic Rush has been developed by the aptly named Team Nitronic, a group of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, the same school responsible for Narbacular Drop. As you can tell from the release trailer above, the game looks flippin' gorgeous (see what we did there?), and we can't wait to see if the gameplay ends up being just as stellar. Dragons are so old hat, you guys; glowing mystical daredevil highways are the new hotness.
Portal 1 has sold four million, excluding Steam sales
With an auspicious beginning at the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase in 2006, a small game -- named Narbacular Drop -- from a group of DigiPen students went on to inspire an industry darling. Several oft-quoted lines of dialog and millions of "The cake is a lie" jokes later, Portal was a resounding critical success when it launched inside The Orange Box, also home to Half-Life 2, its two follow-ups, and Team Fortress 2. You knew about the acclaim, but you may not have known that it has moved approximately four million copies in the past four years. What's really surprising, however, is that Valve reached that sales mark without including the numbers for Steam -- numbers that would muddle the accuracy of that four million in terms of actual sales, given that Valve has offered the game free through Steam at various times. It's also unclear whether that number includes individual copies of Portal sold at retail, the Xbox Live Arcade release (Portal: Still Alive), or any other sales channels. We've reached out to Valve for clarity on the total sales of Portal, but for now, four million is nothing to sneeze at -- especially considering the game's humble origins.
Game Informer introduces the minds behind Portal 2
Here's the thing about Portal: we love it so much, we want to know everything about it. Like, the dude that came up with that Test Chamber 14 setup? Yeah, tell us all about him and whether he was upset or proud that somebody figured out how to get through it in five seconds. That's why this Game Informer video is so fascinating. It's a brief documentary on both the DigiPen students and Valve veterans that created Portal -- and are subsequently now working on Portal 2. It's like a video diary of completely attractive and charismatic people you may have a slight unprofessional obsession with. Frankly, they're our heroes ... even if Garrett admitted to LARPing at one point in his life.
DigiPen expands, increasing graduating class size by a third
[Image credit: Wade Rockett] Being a premier college for game developers seeking out bachelor's and master's degrees in mind-bending, DigiPen recently announced plans to expand its campus to a larger location in Redmond, Washington. A 100,000 square-foot ex-Microsoft building will house the expanded facilities -- said to include "tiered-seating auditoriums, classrooms, art studios, electronic labs, a large work area for students to study and collaborate on projects, library, cafeteria with a professional kitchen, student recreation room and a general store" -- and the opening is set to take place as early as this Summer. Redmond Mayor John Marchione points to the school's financial and culture benefits to the region in the press release, saying, "DigiPen is a tremendous asset to the Redmond community, with considerable contributions to education, the arts and our local economy." The Seattle Times points out that this move brings with it an increase in the school's matriculated roster from 900 to 1,200, bringing DigiPen one small step closer to total global domination.
Nokia's 6208c now official, officially in love with stylus input
Nokia's 6208c (or 6208 classic, if you prefer) isn't arriving as a surprise, though it is quite nice to see it being made completely official. The rather unique handset was designed with the Chinese market in mind, as it boasts an integrated, removable stylus modeled after bamboo slips for inputting Chinese characters via pen. You'll also notice a stainless steel back cover, 3.2-megapixel camera (with twin LED flash), a 4x digital zoom and a microSD slot for expanding storage. Mum's the word on pricing, but it should be loosed in "select markets" during the first half of 2009.
DigiPen students penning deal with the IP devil?
Here's a little tale of warning for all future attendees of "schools" like DigiPen: Read the fine print! As Kim Pallister, business developer for Microsoft Casual Games, was "shocked" to discover, the students who created Toblo don't actually own the rights to their intellectual property. Toblo, the 2007 Independent Games Festival Best Student Game winner, is actually the property of the DigiPen school business and games development apprenticeship institute. Well, ain't that just a kick in the junk?Steve Chiavelli, one of the creators of Toblo said in a post, "We knowingly (naively?) signed away the rights to everything we would make when entering DigiPen. Personally, it seemed like a good trade-off. I would be attending what I had researched to be arguably the best place for learning how to be a game programmer."We wonder if the other "school," Full Sail, has the same policy? Poor students, in the words of Ursula from The Little Mermaid, "You've got your looks, your pretty face and don't forget the importance of body language." 'Cause your brain, your brain belongs to DigiPen.[Via GameSetWatch]
DigiPen student games released
DigiPen Institute of Technology has unveiled most of the student games created for the 2007 academic year. Nearly two dozen projects will available by the end of the month covering a wide range of styles -- from space shooters, to puzzlers and the popular "riding a motorcycle in medieval times" genre.Unfortunately the most interesting games are still unavailable, but with just a few days left in the month, the wait will be short: Bossinabox - a fast-paced arcade-style shooter based on the idea that boss fights are awesome. Your goal is to annihilate the boss as he splits into an army of minibosses. Empyreal Nocturne - a third-person aerial action game in which you combat enormous flying monsters by commanding a legion of birds. Gigoon - a 3D, third-person action game in which the player takes control of a giant monster rampaging through the tropical city of Rio De Janeiro PHLOP - a 3D physics-based puzzle game that asks the player to manipulate simple objects to create complex device in order to complete the puzzle. RydenStryke - a third person action game set in medieval times where the player gets to control a character from the future on a motorcycle. A well-respected school with game developers, DigiPen's student projects have turned more than a few heads over the years. The team behind Narbacular Drop was snatched up by Valve, and the group behind the block-tossing Toblo have gained a lot of attention for their project.
Student Postmortem with DigiPen's Toblo
Walking the fine line between simple and just plain boring gameplay is a delicate issue, especially with independent game makers. How do you make a game appealing without stripping it of the elements that keep players coming back for more? GameCareerGuide's postmortem with the Toblo design answers just those questions, discussing the high and low points in the development process. "Light-hearted" and "easy to play" were two key phrases in the design of Toblo, a simple capture the flag game created by a group of DigiPen students. Played in a world of colored blocks, your only goal is to capture the other team's flag. Your weapons are the very blocks that surround you, simply walk up to anything and tear it down to load up on ammo, then dash into the enemy's fort and let 'em fly. Although Toblo isn't a full-fledged game, it's proof that a concept doesn't need to be elaborate to be interesting.
Students snatched up to develop Portal
There's an interesting rags to finely rendered riches story to be found in an interview conducted with Valve's newest employees -- the DigiPen students responsible for Narbacular Drop, a crazy foray into transitive gameplay that now serves as the inspiration for Valve's mindbending Portal. Kim Swift, one of the developers on the project, notes how rapidly their run-in with Gabe Newell changed their careers and their lives:"Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."The rest of the interview clarifies some issues regarding the Half-Life 2: Episode Two companion, ruling out multiplayer (for now) and firmly labeling the game as a level-based adventure of puzzles and experiments gone awry. Swift was slightly lethargic in sharing information with regards to where exactly Portal fits into the Half-Life universe, though we'd bet a headcrab or two that the protagonist will be a Black Mesa alumni. Perhaps Adrian Shepherd has become an unwitting test subject for the Aperture Science Laboratories? That suggestion isn't too outlandish, at least not to the same degree as this response from Swift when she seemingly misunderstands a question about EA potentially purchasing Valve:"As far as I know, Valve has no plans of purchasing EA."Win-win scenario in an alternate universe: Valve-EA releases a Half-Life game on time, every year.Previously: Half-Life 2 confirmed for Xbox 360, PS3 First trailer of Valve's Portal released Team Fortress 2 is so 'incredibles'
Student Games Coming to Revolution?
DigiPen Institute of Technology is often referred to as a "feeder" school for Nintendo, with many of its graduates being directly employed by Nintendo. Go Nintendo has rumored that the games created by students at DigiPen will be available from the Revolution's downoad service. The list of games that will be provided (if the rumor proves true) is huge. Too big, in my opinion, to be feasible, but if Nintendo only picks the top 10-15 of each graduating class, it will be a big event. I could see the release of the best games being just as highly anticipated as those by professional developers, especially if they are reasonably priced.This rumor is similar to the game download service available over Xbox Live, with one primary exception. There is currently no good way for a brilliant young developer to get recognition until he or she has spent years working for a major developer. This mechanic will provide an easy way for new, good games to gain instant access to a wide audience.
