On Friday, January 29th, Flashpoint Academy students across multiple disciplines came together to join in a worldwide event called the “Global Game Jam 2010″ held at universities and game studios around the world (well over 1000 participants are now working in 38 countries! — these crazy people are known as “jammers”). At Flashpoint’s sound stage in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart we started a 48-hour marathon to build games according to parameters kept secret from our jammers until the launch of the event at Flashpoint at the start of their 48-hour adventure. Jammers at Flashpoint are working in teams of about ten students to build these games by 3 pm on Sunday local time.

This year the theme is “deception” and jammers must include one or more of the following in their games: a man, a plan or a canal. Key outcomes include providing an intense opportunity for jammers to collaborate and work together in “crunch mode” doing what they love doing…making games. This is not a school assignment and it is not a business-driven game studio console game effort. These jammers are the true artists of the future. This weekend will stay for them for the rest of their lives.

We have a few special guest “judges” for the end of the weekend where we will allow the teams an opportunity to present their games to the judges. Teams will be awarded recognition in different areas, but only one game will get trophies for top honors here.

I started the ball rolling at Flashpoint after we had a student team join in with the wonderful people at DePaul who graciously invited them to be a part of the experience there in January of 2009. We would have been there again this year but we had such high interest here that we had to set up our own location. After months of preparation and the efforts and dedication by a really enthusiastic team of staff and faculty…here we are, starting up day 2. I am honored to be directing our location, but I could not have done it without them — and without our really amazing students who surprise me from time to time when they finally realize that they have the potential to do anything in the world they want to do.

2009 was a big year for iPhone apps, seeing the development and release of thousands of mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. At the beginning of 2010, the editors at The Portable Gamer consulted on the best App Store games and selected bitFLIP as one of the top TPG Picks of 2009.

“BitFLIP has got a unique take on the gem matching casual game that has been so popular for the last several years. By giving each piece two sides, there are multiple ways to create your combos. Add to that the variety of power-ups that are available, and you have a game that is always different. Whether you have a few minutes, or all the in the world, the multiple game modes have an option to fit into your schedule. Honestly though, one of the best things BitFlip has going for it is the music by Robert Clouth, it’s energetic and fun which sets the tone for gameplay well. – Frank Delaney”

bitFLIP was developed by Flashpoint Academy graduates at Metamoorephosis.

Designed to mimic a real-world pitching environment, FlashPitch gave students the opportunity to confidently present their ideas and make a great impression on those who call the shots in the game, film, animation, and recording arts industries.

I am thrilled to share that two students from the Game Development program at Flashpoint are featured as winners in a recent Game Design Challenge held by one of the industry’s most important websites. First year student Emily Greenquist won as Best Entry, and Terumi Tamaki won an honorable mention. Follow the links to check out the full details!

From the article: “Results from Game Design Challenge: Literary Inspirations”
We have hundreds, even thousands, of years of literature to draw from — yet so little of it has been used for source material for games. Early next year, Electronic Arts will release Dante’s Inferno, a very loose adaptation of part of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century.

What follows are the best and most original entries we received. Here are our top picks.

Best Entries:

Emily Greenquist, Student, Flashpoint Academy (Year One Student)
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Greenquist takes a complex story and weaves it into a solid game concept. The Picture of Dorian Gray, as a horror-themed RPG, puts players in the role of an amoral protagonist who must eventually face the consequences of his actions. Though the experience would be a largely passive one for the player, the depth in narrative promises a rich payoff.

Honorable Mention:

Terumi Tamaki, Romeo and Juliet: Happily Ever After (Year Two Student)

Congratulations to both of these outstanding students on their accomplishment!

Rich Moskal

My name is Andrew Prete. I attend Flashpoint Academy and I am “a gamer.” I am studying to become the greatest game producer that ever lived. Everything I do revolves around games, from seeing who can eat a giant piece of pizza (with pepperoni) the fastest, to driving down Lake Shore Drive weaving in and out of traffic because I can, or playing head games with my friends. Now, you might be asking yourself, how is this guy a film fanatic? Well, I will tell you.

When I am watching a movie I am emotionally vested from the very beginning. I experience what the character experiences. I laugh, cry and get scared. I am there in the thick of it every step of the way — even when the movie is not so great. I accept their reality and run with it. These things called “motion pictures” give me an escape I could have never imagined. They are my biggest muse and hold much power over me. I don’t criticize or look down upon them; I simply enjoy them like a baby discovers his or her own fingers: with wonderment and awe.

I recently had the pleasure to hear Rich Moskal talk at Flashpoint and give us his point of view of the film industry. Rich Moskal has served as the director of the Chicago Film Office for thirteen years, but before that he was a kid and a student — a student trying to find his way in the world not knowing what to do, say, or think. He attended Loyola for a short time and studied some form of medical mumbo jumbo. Trust me when I say he has done a ton of jobs both in and out of the film industry.

What I connected to most was the kindness and generosity Rich seemed to have. When he works, he does so not only for himself but for those around him. He wants to be the best he can be. Not the best producer or editor or actor. Not the best location scout or writer or camera operator. Not even the best director of the Chicago Film Office. He wants to be the best person he can be — a person who wants not only to see himself succeed but also wants those around him to succeed as well. All the stories he told and the things he accomplished boil down to just one thing: that this person came to Flashpoint, talked with the students, and answered our questions because he wants to see us have the success that we want.

I am thirty-two years old, newly married and have started my life over by coming to Flashpoint. I hope to have the same success that Rich has had but in the game industry.

On Tuesday, June 30th, 2009, Flashpoint Academy was proud to host the first ever IGDA Chicago Demo Night, an evening dedicated to what’s new and upcoming in the world of game development.

Headlined by Robomodo’s Tony Hawk: The Ride and Vogster’s Robocalypse: Beaver Defense, IGDA Demo Night also gave teams from Flashpoint Academy, DePaul University, Columbia College, Chewysoft, Entertaining Games, and others the opportunity to present works-in-progress and recently completed projects to an audience of their peers. Other presenters included Joseph Hocking, Charlie Hoyt, Zooptek, and Flashpoint’s own Simeon Peebler.

Turn out was great, and we’re so happy that everyone arrived early enough to enjoy some snacks and socialize a bit in Flashpoint’s Digital Garage before the presentations began. It was very cool to have so many talented minds together in one place and we’re very excited to participate again next year.

“Years ago [iPhone technology] wasn’t on the radar as game developers, and now look how central it is to our lives,” said Simeon Peebler, who recently published his first application, “Blip Bloink.”

The Tetris-like game costs $.99 per download, of which he gets to keep 70 percent.  Apple keeps the rest.

As the Game Development Chair at Flashpoint Academy, Peebler said the opportunity to make money is what attracts many to the application-building business.

Read the full story here.

For the full piece, click here.

This is an important, highly visible industry competition, and is part of http://www.gamasutra.com, THE central website for the game industry. This work was executed in conjunction with the second year Focused Game Design course lead by Richard Coons.

Recently, a Game Design Challenge asked you to create a fantasy game for game development. Fantasy sports are one of the biggest games around, and what’s interesting is many people don’t consider them games or their players to be gamers.

The heart of fantasy sports lies in tying real-world performance of something (such as an athlete) to points. Players of fantasy sports have to gauge the real world in some way to win with their game, and that’s what the best entries did in response to this challenge.

There are multiple ways to tie real-world performance to a fantasy game in the game industry. One way is to draft actual developers, and they can be rated by history. For example, Shigeru Miyamoto could be rated 10 in game design, where as Manveer Heir may be ranked 1. To get at these ratings, we can consider factors such as titles shipped, years of experience, and quality of titles (based on Metacritic scores, for example), to name a few.

The difficulty is how to take regular performance measure in an industry that doesn’t give frequent updates or metrics for measuring output. If Miyamoto’s next game is the worst game in the world, and Heir is working on the next smash-hit, players won’t know or get credit for it. As a result, scores may become too dependent on past history instead of the future. Fantasy sports, after all, are all about predicting the future.

Another way to tie real-world performance is to look at the world from the development studio’s perspective. Here you can choose studios and their quality and sales numbers can be used for rankings. The potential issue is the lag time between games. The number of studios that would need to be drafted could be major and make the game last a lot longer than many other sports. However, it would also give players a reason to research deeply. Maybe Valve isn’t the best draft pick, because its game releases are often far apart. Maybe a company like Telltale Games, with episodic releases on a monthly basis, is a better value for winning. There are a lot of ways to go deep by valuing talent on the development level.

An offshoot of this idea is to draft games instead of development studios. Choose what games you think will perform well in the next few months, and maybe every few months future releases are up for grabs.

Going a step above that, one could look at the game publishers themselves. Stock price, sales numbers, number of releases, quality of product, Game Developer magazine’s annual “Top 20 Publishers” ranking, and more could be used to rate the companies on a regular basis for scoring purposes. Much like development studios, it may take a while to get scores given the nature of game releases, but having to choose an actual publisher to draft could make this a very business-conscience game. Much like how Fantasy Baseball is the best fantasy game for pure stat geeks, a Fantasy Game Development revolving around publishers may be the best choice for those interested in the pure business side of the industry.

There are other ways to think about the problem, and you didn’t have to limit yourself to the ones presented here, as the following Best Entries illustrate.

Best Entries
Cassandra Yukimoto, Winning Portfolio (see page 2)
Cassandra Yukimoto’s idea, Winning Portfolio, got to the heart of fantasy sports — trading, drafting, and real world performance impacting the game. And in describing her idea, she split the task into two parts: the game itself (”the what” as she calls it) and her explanation and defense of the idea (”the why”), which paid attention to her reasons for bending some implicit rules of the genre and the challenge. In particular, we appreciated this: “Given the constraints enumerated above, I don’t think it’s possible to produce a ‘fantasy game design league’ that allows players to staff their own game studio or development team with industry names and have success be determined by live, real-world stats in a meaningful way.”

Patrick Mousel, Student, Flashpoint Academy, Quadruple A (see page 3)
In Quadruple A, players are marketers and publishers, and the ranking and rating of game titles occurs by category. Focusing the game in this way helped Patrick Mousel isolate measurable factors that could be compared in a competitive but fair way.

E. McNeill, Dartmouth College, VG Mogul (see page 4)
Similar to Patrick Mousel’s concept, E. McNeill’s game idea tightened the realm of possibilities by restricting what will be measured in the game, namely, “all the video games that are scheduled to be released in the next month.” Whether a one-month window would hold up in play tests is unknown, but setting strict parameters from the start a good way to tackle the problem at hand.

Honorable Mentions
Rafael Luciano, North Fort Myers High School, Dev Cycle (see page 5)
High school student Rafael Luciano showed a clear general understanding of the genre of fantasy sports-style games. We would have liked to have seen a little more detail in terms of the scoring (are the developers’ weekly salaries static or subject to change — if so, how, and if not does the game have too few factors?), but all in all, this was a strong solution to the challenge.

Joel M. Viernes, Hawaii Community College Hilo, Fantasy Game Development 2008 (see page 6)
Fantasy Game Development 2008 was another strong solution to this challenge, which added an interesting twist in the form of “Legendary IPs,” a neat idea that we felt deserved an honorable mention.

Click here to read entire article.