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May 14, 2009

Some FIEA plugging

Because FIEA (http://www.fiea.ucf.edu) is a relatively young program, just now on it’s fifth set of students, I want to make sure that its name gets out there and promoted well. After all, if my alma mater looks good, then I look good.

FIEA (pronounced “phy-uh”) stands for the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy and is part of the University of Central Florida. Graduates of the 16-month program will receive a master’s degree in interactive entertainment. There are three tracks available: art, programming, or production. Because classes are never scheduled simultaneously, you’re welcome to sit in on the other tracks, regardless of which track you’re in. You may notice that one of the tracks is in production, rather than design. Everyone’s a designer, of course! So in addition to design fundamentals, producers are taught project management skills.

Unanimously, we graduates agree that thanks to the industry grade tools, group work environment, and projects at FIEA, we were able to hit the ground running with minimal ramp-up in the real world.

The faculty is ace and industry-worn, with plenty of relevant war stories to tell. Several of them remain in active development positions outside of the university. However, thanks to the low ratio of students to professors (current cohort is maxed out at ~50 students; mine was ~35) and one-group-of-students-at-a-time focus, they’re readily available and eager to provide guidance and feedback.

New Brochure

Our communications director Todd Deery just sent notice that the newest brochures have just left the presses, and he graciously provided me with the PDF proof so that I could share it here with you. [PDF, right-click to download]

iPhone Crossfire Port

Our programmers were once tasked with developing and porting a simple game from the PC to the Xbox. A couple of them decided to adapt the Milton Bradley game Crossfire into a network multiplayer title. Now, its been ported and renamed x-Fire for the iPhone. Check out the website Game-Grinder.com for more details and video. I don’t think it’s network-capable anymore, but obviously with multitouch, both players can play on the same iPhone. What is notably missing is the cheesy lounge cover of the Crossfire TV commercial song that they used as background music.

Street Fighter, ASCII Edition

Perhaps you saw this on Kotaku? This is a network rock-paper-scissors test game for the engine that the Cohort 5 programmers are working on.

Carl @ 2:02 am
Filed under: Games,Personal — Tags: board game, fiea, iphone, milton bradley, street fighter, video —

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May 3, 2009

Good parts of “bad” games: Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

As you may have seen in a previous post, I’m playing through Codemasters/Team17′s take on Leisure Suit Larry, Box Office Bust. I’m about 5 hours in and encountered more irritatingly executed mechanics than what I’d seen when I first wrote my impressions. However, much like Magna Cum Laude, though the “gameplay” itself is kinda lame, the overall experience, writing, and humor pretty much make up for those shortcomings to where I’m totally willing to turn a blind eye to them. I still prefer MCL‘s art style and innovative dialogue system, but in BOB (if you know the right response), you can listen to all the wrong answers before moving to the next level of the dialogue tree. Unfortunately, if you do get the right answer earlier than you’d hope, loading an earlier save will almost certainly set you back quite a long ways from your current point, both in playtime and in distance. I hope that whoever writes the (hopefully) inevitable FAQ with all spoken dialogue writes in the ad-libbed VO versions rather than just transcribe the subtitles.

Anyway…

I thought I’d kick off the first in this “good parts of bad games” series with one of my favorite examples, the aforementioned dialogue system from Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude. (more…)

Carl @ 5:17 am
Filed under: Games,Techniques — Tags: adventure, comedy, dialogue, good parts of bad games, leisure suit larry, video —

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April 9, 2009

A good copy of a good thing, though a copy, is still good

I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s recent “so easy a kid can do it, so eat it, Apple” ads, and I think this new one for the Xbox 360 is another winner. Sure, it’s a little too Hitchhiker’s/Stephen Fry/LittleBigPlanet, but it still has its own authentic charms.