Blogs

Tim Stephens from University News wrote up the following article, also viewed here: http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/12/brenda-romero.html

December 18, 2012

By Tim Stephens

The Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has appointed Brenda Romero (formerly Brenda Brathwaite) as a game designer in residence, the first such position on a UC campus. An award-winning game designer, Romero is co-founder and chief operating officer of Loot Drop, Inc., where she plans to continue working on game titles currently in development.

The new Game Designer in Residence program brings a leading game designer to UCSC to teach courses and serve as an adviser and resource for game design students, faculty, and researchers on campus. The one-year, 80-percent appointment includes teaching foundational courses in game design, giving students an unequaled opportunity to learn directly from an expert practitioner. Romero's appointment starts January 1, 2013.

"It is tremendously exciting to have Brenda Romero as UCSC's first game designer in residence," said Jim Whitehead, professor and chair of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering. "She brings to the position over 30 years of experience in game design and an extensive understanding of the business of games, and she is an innovator in the teaching of game design. It's huge that our students will have the opportunity to learn directly from her."

Game Design Practicum (CMPS 179) is a class focused on the practice of game design and construction with a focus on innovative game mechanics. Aimed at junior students in the Computer Game Design major as well as those concentrating in Digital Arts and New Media, the class involves collaborating in small teams to quickly prototype and test game mechanics and digital game design ideas in digital and analog format. We are seeking a class that balances software engineering with game design and UI skills.

For Winter 2013, the theme is Experimental Game Designs across various platforms, including but not limited to web, Windows Mobile 8, Microsoft Surface, Kinect, and Xbox.

This class is sponsored by Microsoft, and in order to better enable a close collaboration, students will be asked to sign an Intellectual Property waiver.

UCSC Game Design alum and 2011 Sammy's Grand Prize winner John Peters has another game to his name. Skate Trash Mobile launched on iOS yesterday!

Skate Trash Mobile is a 2D skateboarding game for iOS with some quirky characters (the Santa Cruz Skate Hand logo), pro skaters (Geoff Rowley and Steve Caballero, both were skaters in the Tony Hawk series of games), popular bands such as NOFX, and some big brands (Rockstar, Volcom, Vans, and more).  There should be more worlds coming soon as well.

John did all of the programming/build management for the project for a new startup in Santa Cruz - Boing, Inc.  Boing consists of Shawn Hickey (a UCSC alum as well), Ed Gregor (senior animator for Santa Cruz Games), and Jimbo Phillips (famous skate culture artist).

John's very happy with how it turned out. Support fellow UCSC students and promote local games - go check it out!

Skate Trash Mobile is available on the app store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skate-trash-mobile/id564018144?mt=8

John and two 170 teammates started a local game development company here in Santa Cruz after graduation, Team Krinoid. You can view their past and future work on their website - teamkrinoid.com

A 20-year-old college student has rebuilt Portal, Valve's 2007 space-bending game, from the ground up, on—wait for it—a graphing calculator. In a display that puts the old calculator versions of Marioand Tetris to shame, Alex Marcolina posted to a gaming forum and reddit on Sunday about his re-engineered version of Portal. It took three years to build and cannot, due to resource constraints on TI-83/84 calculators, execute more than 16 kilobytes of code.

When Marcolina set out to rebuild Portal on TI’s graphing calculator platform, he was 17. Now, he’s a 20-year-old game design major at UC-Santa Cruz who programs games mainly for computers, but likes to dabble in graphing calculator games on occasion because it's “a fun challenge to make a game for a platform that is not supposed to even support games."

The native language for the TI-83 and 84 calculators is called TiBasic. But when it comes to making games, creators favor a language called Axe, developed by a member of the calculator and PC gaming forum Omnimaga. Marcolina points out the syntax for Axe is “very loose, but it allows for good optimization in the translation from code to assembly.”

Read more here.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/12/portals-physics-engine-rebuilt-in-25kb-on-a-graphing-calculator/

We were thrilled to be joined today by Lincoln Wallen, the Chief Technology Officer of Dreamworks, for today's lecture in the Inventing the Future of Games series.

Dreamworks is a huge animation studio. They release 3 movies a year, with 8-10 in production at any given time. These films are released in over 100 markets worldwide. Each film contains roughly 120,000 individual frames, each frame including thousands of assets. All in all, this adds up to a massive amount of computing. Terabytes are created daily, with over 17,000 processing cores working hard to manage all of it.

As CTO, this information has presented a constant challenge as the demand for more efficient and dynamic computing power increases within Dreamworks. The solution, Wallen has found, is to move away from sequential computing and move towards paralellism; having many systems running alongside each other.

Classically, most networks use Network Filing Systems(NFS) to manage data transfers within the company. For Dreamworks, however, this model had to be set aside. Simply too much data is being transferred around for it to be efficient. Dreamworks uses a sophistocated cloud computing system that allows any individual computer to utilize as much processing power as it needs to bake simulations, fast. This solves another major problem that his company has faced in recent years; as you increase the processing power of each individual core, you often have to change your software. This is undesirable for a huge company that uses a lot of software, because it creates more labor. When you simply increase the number of cores used rather than improving the individual cores, you circumvent this problem.