Blogs

UCSC's graduate program ranked 8th, up one spot from last year, and the undergraduate program once again received an Honorable Mention. We are pleased to be recognized for our commitment to academics, research, and community. 

From the Princeton Review:

The Princeton Review has selected the best undergraduate and graduate institutions in the United States and Canada where you can study video game design. We ranked the top 15 undergraduate and top 15 graduate programs. We gave another 20 outstanding programs “Honorable Mention” designations, saluting 50 schools in all that we highly recommend for game design study.

We chose these programs based on a 2012 survey of administrators at institutions offering game design coursework and/or degrees. Selection criteria included the quality of the curriculum, faculty credentials, facilities and infrastructure as well as data on scholarships, financial aid and career opportunities.

Learn more about our ranking methodology.

See The Top Undergraduate Game Design Programs

See The Top Graduate Game Design Programs

The subject of mobile games is kind of a strange one for a lot of indie gamers. Between the banner ads, constant prodding over in-app purchases, the onslaught of invasive tutorials and just plain being boring, there is often not a lot to like. You can pay more for the quality stuff, sure, but sometimes you just want a short, fun experience without all the annoying baggage.

Some friends of mine from college, indie developers and hardcore players-of-games themselves, recognized the elements of mobile gaming that most seem to dislike and took it as a challenge to create something new and exciting. Forming Studio Mu as part of their senior seminar and banding together a team of artists, writers and game designers, they set off to create their very first game!

Read the full article here: http://indiestatik.com/2013/02/24/microventures-released-for-android-and-ios-a-procedural-roguelike-adventure-game/

From Team Krinoid:

Our long talked about next project "Bunny Run" has just gone live on Kickstarter!  Think Rayman Origins meets Guitar Hero/Bit Trip Runner, but with a twist: the speed of the song is tied directly to the speed of your characters. 

Here's the link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1738566771/bunny-run

Check it out if you like!

Last week we were thrilled to take a first glimpse at the 21 boxes of games donated to UCSC via the UC San Diego library. With each box containing just under 100 games, we're expecting around 1,600 games to be added to UCSC's already expansive video game collection, hosted in the Science and Engineering Library. (If you haven't explored that collection yet, we highly recommend you do, by the way.) This donation includes original Playstation games, Playstation 2 games, and the occasional PSP game and random other treasures. We spotted a how-to-code accessory at one point, and had only peeked in four boxes. The enormous collection has never been catalogued, but we suspect this may be the entirety of Sony's Japanese releases on PS 1 and 2. The interesting collection crosses cultural barriers, with numerous pachinko games, anime-based games, and even the elusive train genre! For anyone who watches GameCenter CX, the hit Japanese television series based on challenging retro games, I suspect you might be able to find some of Arino's favorites here. The collection is thanks to the efforts of a number of people.

It all started with a game tester, who was also studying Japanese, was asked to dispose of the games. Instead of throwing them away, he contacted the head of Japanese Studies at UC San Diego. From that point they moved around, without joining any library, until the right connections were made and UCSC became the lucky recipient. For years the collection seemed destined to be the victim of campus reorganizations, only saved through the efforts of Stefan Tanaka, Jeremy Douglass, Lev Manovich, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Sam Dunlap, and Christy Caldwell.

The graduate program for Game Design at UCSC is home to many gifted and amazing people. In the coming months, we will be showcasing some of these students! To begin our series, we asked Ben Samuel to come in and talk to us about his life. As it turns out, he’s a really interesting guy.

Ben is working on his ninth year at UCSC. He graduated as a double major in Theater and Computer Science, and then went on into UCSC’s graduate theater program. He was set to move to LA to begin an acting career, when fate intervened and he enrolled in Computer Science 248; Michael Mateas’s Interactive Narrative class. “That class changed my life. It showed me something that was a hybrid of everything I am passionate about, all rolled into one.” Immediately, Ben made plans to enter UCSC’s PhD program in game design.