Intermediate Game Projects, Fall ’06

By: Max

On: January 9th, 2007

Hey everybody, allow me to emerge from lurking to plug what kept me from writing as much as I would have liked last semester: student videogames!
Specifically, these were the games made by the USC Interactive Media Division‘s Intermediate Design/Programming class last fall, and some of them turned out super great (mine did not, but let’s not talk about that). Innovative mechanics and messages were a theme for the course, and my classmates and I strove to create these things with the highest level of polish we could muster. The game pictured here, Polarity, by Justin Perez and James Miao exemplifies the best of the course: simple, catchy, quirky, and fully polished, and I wish I could say that RagnaRøkk (ambitious, derivative, and ultimately crude, and the best parts of it were due to my partner Mike Brazil, not me) turned out the same. Elementary Disaster by Steven Proust and Joni Cheng is a solid advocacy game in my opinion. Insurgency (Peter van Dyke and John Lund) and Moral Dilemma (Todd Caranto, John Banayan, Sola Aiyegbusi) both managed to tackle issues regarding American foreign policy without becoming strident or shrill in their treatment of the subject matter, something of a rarity (and an entirely too classy one at that) for college students. All of these games were made from scratch using Torque Game Builder and a whole lot of love.

You can find them all here.

Also, to my fellow students, have you done your GDC scholarship application yet? The deadline is tomorrow!