The most exciting part about being in a room full of students and their video game projects is that any one of them might turn out to be the next big developer.
I went to the University of Southern California’s Fall 2014 Demo Day, a showcase for student development teams to talk about their work-in-progress games. These juniors and seniors are from USC Games’ Advanced Game class. Once a committee approves their pitches for the course, they only have one school year to assemble a team (including fellow students from USC, alumni, and other schools) and develop a polished game in time for their final presentations in the spring.
It’s a process that mimics what happens in the real world — up to and including forming a company to try to secure funding, should they want to. That’s one of the reasons why the program has such a sterling reputation, which seems to keep growing every year.
According to the Princeton Review, it’s the No.1 game design program in North America. People who’ve taken the class in the past have gone on to do stellar work in the industry, such as Journey developers Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, Threes developer Asher Vollmer, and Matt Korba and Paul Bellezza from The Odd Gentlemen (the studio that recently inherited the historic King’s Quest franchise). The professors teach students not just how to turn their ideas into commercial products, but also to push the boundaries of what video games can be.
The December version of Demo Day marks the halfway point of the class, so the deadline forces the students to have a playable version of their games up and running. Since it’s still early, many had unfinished or temporary animations, sounds, and graphics. But the core gameplay ideas were there and they showed a lot of potential. I can’t wait to see how much will change between now and May, when I’ll check in with the student teams again at the spring Demo Day.
In the meantime, here’s a quick look at the five projects they’re working on. (To see how they turned out, check out part two of my story here.)
ElemenTerra
Above: An earlier version of the palette.
Team size: 35
Target platforms: Oculus Rift DK2 and the Sixense STEM motion controller
Premise: ElemenTerra is built from the ground-up for VR. While the developers want it to be compatible with all sorts of VR devices and controllers, the Demo Day setup used an Oculus Rift headset and Razer Hydra motion controllers. You play as a “nature spirit” who has the power to shape the earth and to grow plants and trees. Director Max Pittsley said the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender served as an inspiration for the terraforming gameplay. The team hopes that players will feel a connection to the world they’re creating.
How it plays: I kind of felt like a supernatural Bob Ross, the former PBS painter. Tilting the controller in my left hand brings up a transparent palette, but instead of having gobs of paint, it has different types of plant life and abilities to choose from. The right controller is the brush, and if I dip that into one of the spots on my palette, I can use the trigger buttons to make gardens, hills, or even carve through the ground until I see the planet’s core.
Above: Here’s ElemenTerra’s hassle-free VR rig and charming welcome mat.
The ElemenTerra team doesn’t want players to use a joystick to turn around, so they built a contraption that funneled the Rift’s wires through a series of pipes to prevent people from getting tangled [pictured right] when they turn their bodies. For now, the game doesn’t have any specific goals or objectives to accomplish — it’s an open-ended sandbox.
What they hope to finish by spring: While the students involved with it spent the fall semester figuring out how ElemenTerra’s mechanics will work, they still have one big question to answer: What do they want it to be?
“We need to decide what to do with the rest of our time,” said Pittsley. “Do we expand it and make it more of a game? Or do we polish it and make it just this really visceral experience that catches on and is this really shiny, perfected nugget of VR?”
King Basil’s Quest for the Crown of Spudly Awesomeness
Above: Concept art for King Basil.
Team size: 40
Target platforms: PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Premise: Describing the absurd plot of King Basil’s Quest in my own words doesn’t do it justice, so I’ll let creative director Trevor Taylor explain it to you.
“A fat, pompous ass of a king — Basil — is trying to reclaim a discontinued discount from his favorite medieval fast-food chain, Tater King,” said Taylor. “It’s like Harold and Kumar meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He finds out that if he orders 10,000 [tater nuggets], he gets free nuggs for life from this restaurant. He gets 9,999 and discovers that they discontinued the discount. Outraged, he sets out on a rampage across the land to conquer all Tater Kings until he gets his discount back. And that’s where the gameplay takes place.”
How it plays: The animations were still rough and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to play, but I ended up having some fun with this comedic take on strategy and tower defense games. In order to win, you have to destroy other castles by sending out your archers and knights. With the tablet version, I tapped and dragged my fighters across three different paths. The enemy — stemming from exotic locales like the “wastelands of funk” — have their own soldiers as well, so you have to protect your castle with both your troops and with magical towers.
The demo also had some surprisingly good voice acting. The dev team hired a few actors from USC, including an improv comedian (Paul Stanko) as the voice of Basil.
What they hope to finish by spring: “I’m happy with what we’ve made now. We have a ton of content to work with,” said Trevor. “Now we just have to polish it. I’d argue we have more animations in our game than any of the other games [here]. It’s just none of it has been polished.”
In addition to making King Basil more intuitive, the team is thinking of putting in a local multiplayer mode. But if that doesn’t work out, they’ll shift focus to building levels and enemies for the “desert sands of the Orc Mariachi,” which will have big orcs dressed up in mariachi outfits and who fight with “maraca maces.”
Howie and Yarla
Above: Eating demons charges Yarla’s special attack.
Team size: 28
Target platforms: PC, Mac
Premise: Howie and Yarla is about a nerdy teenager who just wants to have more friends, but before that can happen, he has to deal with a twisted form of puberty. On his 16th birthday, Howie finds out he’s half-demon when he discovers the snake-like Yarla growing out of his back. This event opens up a portal that enables other demons to come into the real world and invade Howie’s high school.
According to game director Colin Horgan, the team is aiming for the kind of darkly humorous tone you see with cartoons on Adult Swim (Rick and Morty was a big influence). That helps explain a peculiar scene from the demo when Howie was chasing after a giant slice of pizza that had eyes, legs, and … a butt.
“I’m a big fan of horror games — Silent Hill 2 is one my favorite games ever — so I wanted to have a bit of that psychological influence be put in there, like a lot of focus on the id, Freudian theory, and stuff like that,” said Horgan. “That kind of comes up with the metaphors going on in the midst of our silly action game. … And there’s even a silly little bit with the pizza having a butt: adding that psychosexual element to things because that is a big part of puberty, too. It’s something we wanted to try to grapple with.”
How it plays: Horgan cites developers Platinum Games and Vlambeer as inspiration for the combat system. By using Yarla’s tentacles, Howie can attack with quick strikes or grab enemies and toss them at bigger monsters. Holding down the grab button also widens Yarla’s mouth, and when it’s fully extended, Yarla can devour smaller creatures and convert them into energy for a special fireball-spewing attack.
Though combat didn’t feel as tight as it should be, it was one of the most impressive parts of the demo, something I didn’t expect from just looking at the lovely 2D graphics.
What they hope to finish by spring: With the core mechanics set, the student developers will focus on adding more levels, enemies, and powers. The plan is to have the high school act as a hub world from which the player can select new missions. Horgan says that for their final presentation, they want to have a “polished, tight 40 minute-ish experience that shows ‘This is what Howie and Yarla is.’”
Vanishing Point
Above: Rose can make objects bigger or smaller with her powers.
Team size: 20
Target platforms: PC, Mac
Premise: Vanishing Point puts you in the shoes of Rose, a girl with a rare condition called Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS). In real life, the disability affects the way you see things: Objects may appear larger or smaller than they actually are. In this game, the developers turned it into a superpower. Rose can change the size of things like boxes and staircases with the help of a special glove. She uses this to solve a series of puzzles within a hospital’s test chambers.
The size-manipulation feature was something team lead Max Cohen built during his Intermediate Game class (one of the prerequisites for Advanced Game). Lead producer and co-creator Sam Sandweiss wanted to find a way to work that mechanic into a story, and that’s when he read about AIWS. They were careful about not turning the disability into a gimmick, and they reached out to medical advisers and game writers to collect feedback on how they wanted to portray AIWS in the game.
“We thought that there was an opportunity, narratively, to do something a little bit different, to talk about these themes but [not] do it in the stereotypical way that every other game has done in the past,” said Sandweiss.
Above: The first test chamber reminded me of Portal.
How it plays: I couldn’t help but compare Vanishing Point to other first-person puzzle-solving games. The stark white walls of the first test chamber and the mysterious voices coming over the room’s speakers made me immediately think of Portal, which also introduced a cool way to solve puzzles. Like the Portal gun, however, Rose’s power has a few restrictions. You can only use it on specific objects, and they have a limit to how big or small they can grow. The mechanic itself is simple: You just have to hold down one of the mouse buttons and either walk toward (to shrink) or away (to enlarge) from whatever it is you want to change.
What they hope to finish by spring: The team wants to tell a complete story for their project, but they didn’t realize how hard it’d be to create a narrative-focused 3D game until this past semester, when they all started working with the Unreal game engine for the first time. Over the next few months, they’ll refine Rose’s power and add some variety to the test chambers so that they all feel different from each other (one example Cohen gave was a biology chamber covered in plants and trees).
“The grand irony is we were so worried about having enough content for the showcase today, but we ended up having too much, which is a good place to be,” said Sandweiss. “That puts us in a good position for next semester because we have a whole ‘nother semester to polish what we have. As opposed to creating new content, we can really go back and say, ‘Do we need this?’ or ‘How can we make this better?’”
Pareidolia: A Cast of Shadows
Above: You have to use two devices to play Pareidolia.
Team size: Around 30 to 35
Target platforms: Wii U, PC, Mac, iOS
Premise: Pareidolia’s story is so ambitious that it needs two devices to tell it: a computer and an iPad (you sync them by connecting to the same router). The monitor is home to a series of stylized 2D platforming levels inspired by different folklore from countries like Ireland, Africa, and China. On the tablet, you play as a shadow puppeteer who can manipulate 3D shapes. The shadows that these objects cast are actually the platforms and obstacles you’ll find in the 2D world.
How it plays: While the current setup is just a temporary solution — the developers want to make Pareidolia for the Wii U and its tablet-like GamePad controller — the two-screen concept worked almost flawlessly. The iPad was a versatile tool. When you aren’t moving 3D shapes around, it serves as your controller for moving your character in the 2D world. You can change which mode you’re in by opening and closing its digital curtains.
The actual platforming felt a little sluggish and unresponsive, especially when it came to timing my jumps, but everything else felt pretty smooth. It was cool to see what I was doing on the small screen immediately affect my situation on the big screen.
It’s also possible to make Pareidolia work with a smartphone instead of a tablet, but Aamod Walavalkar, one of the engineers on the project, told me that it wouldn’t be a great experience. Phones lack the screen size and fidelity necessary to make the precise adjustments you need in the 3D levels.
Above: The boulder you see here is something you can grab and move around with the tablet.
What they hope to finish by spring: The Pareidolia crew spent most of the fall semester building the technological infrastructure to support the two-screen design. Creative director Alex McNamara said getting that to work took a lot of “research, play testing, and trial-and-error.” Now that the foundation is almost done, they can start focusing on creating more content. The story they have in mind will unfold over three acts, but since the next five months might not be enough time to accomplish that goal, they’re aiming to finish the prologue (what I played) and the first two acts.
If Pareidolia is in good shape by then, they want to continue working on the game well past graduation day.
“Most of us are graduating in May, so we hope [the spring showcase] sort of springboards us into the opportunity to finish the game, finish the narrative arc, and have a really cohesive and polished piece,” said McNamara.