Team: Troy Johnson, Derek Higgs, Chris Olinquevitch About: Derek, our awesome engineer, came up with the fantastic concept of pinning down creepy-crawlies and then actually feeling them squirm underneath your thumb as you "wrestle" them into submission. With that as the hook mechanic of our game, we decided to wrap it up in a Space Invaders scenario. Instead of blasting space creatures, players must pin the invading critters into submission one at a time, then finally take on their captains and generals to ensure freedom from bug domination.
Floppy Fish
Team: Spencer Buchanan, Eric Levin, Kevin Smith, Chris Olinquevitch About: Floppy Fish is Angry Birds meets education. It was a prototype created for a client that is an educator in mechanical engineering. The goal was to create something that was fun but used spring coefficients and higher level of thinking to solve how to the fish back in his bowl. The prototype was well received and production is postponed indefinitely due to funding.
REALITY CHECK
Team: Brandon Karratti, Derek Higgs, Chris Olinquevitch About: Reality Check is the first video game that I ever worked on. It was meant as a prototype, utilizing the relatively simple development software, Power Game Factory, and was built with a three-person team consisting of our programmer, Derek Higgs, our producer, Brandon Karratti, and myself acting as artist.
Originally known as “Harsh Reality,” this game was meant as a “into the deep end” kind of project – none of us in the University of Utah’s Master Games Studio actually knew one another, we didn’t know each other’s strengths or weaknesses, but instead were just a bunch of strangers thrown into the pits together. Originally, we had a fourth team member, another programmer, but he unfortunately had dropped from the program by the second day, and so it was just the three of us.
When we were given this assignment, the goal was to design a game that had something to do with real life. That definition was intentionally broad, leaving lots of wiggle room, but as we three began to brainstorm, we wanted to put together something interesting, an idea that might push us a little. We wanted something a little different.
Power Game Factory is a Mac-only program designed for the creation of side-scrolling platformers/shooters such as Mario, Contra, Rayman, etc, and while the program’s potential is robust, the reality was that we only had three weeks, and a team of three people who were a little less-than-knowledgeable about game design.