Dejobaan Games - Bringing You Quality Videogames for over 75 Years

Pitch: The game development industry is imploding. Help combine wetware and software to bring about its next incarnation.

We have the opportunity to sponsor an MQP project for the WPI IMGD, a great new major available at the undergraduate level. Our goal is now to try and get the best students interested a project for next fall:

In 1989, Peter Molyneux created Populous, one of the best-selling games of its decade. In 2008, he wrote Fable II. Both sold 3.5 million units. The difference? Populous cost $9,000 to build. Fable II cost over a thousand times as much -- and this trend is changing for the worse! In this MQP, students will accomplish what the video game industry has completely failed to do: reign in development costs by empowering content creators.

Procedural content generation has existed for decades, but the industry has only barely begun to use it reduce runaway development costs. While some games use it good effect (Elite, Diablo, and Spore, for example), there have been many failures -- think samey-samey dungeons; uniform, boring terrain; and dozens of identical random encounters. The best successes have come about as follows: don't replace content creators with algorithms -- use algorithms to make the content creators unbelievably powerful. Tools such as Genetica, SpeedTree, and Mojoworld combine intricate equations with the creativity of an actual human at the helm. These are just the tip of the iceberg.

2 art-track and 2 tech-track students will research topics on procedural model/level generation, L-systems, and animation. Based on this research, they'll design and construct a simple system that's general-purpose enough to be used for multiple tasks, with an interface familiar to content creators. Our goal for this MQP is to provide a topic that we believe will be an industry focus over the next decade.

Q: How do we get 4 students interested in slaving away (in their windowless cellars for 12 hours a day) at work we think will benefit us and the industry, and help them land jobs?

3 Comments:

Answer: Post an awesome pitch like the one above. Bravo, Ichiro. Bravo.

But seriously: Give them an idea of what they'll actually be DOING. Research sounds... meh. What will the programmers be programming? What with the artists be art..ist...ing... what sort of deliverable are you thinking about? Obviously it's ALL subject to change, but students tend to like projects where they have a defined goal, even if that goal goes up in smoke and gets replaced by something else.

- Dan Tennant

By Daniel, At April 1, 2009 at 5:18 PM
It's not easy for non-senior students to realize how important it is to work with an actual game company and how it can really help you when you're job-hunting later on. I think talking about your released games and their successes might tip things in your favor. Also, let them know that they will be working on "real" stuff that's going to be useful to game artist, instead of a throw-away project. Explain that procedural content generation is the new big thing what with all the ballooning budgets and increasing development times on the AAA titles.

By Yilmaz Kiymaz, At April 1, 2009 at 5:20 PM
I think what WPI students want most in their MQP is to have something they can point to and say "I accomplished this." If they are shown a project that will have some sort of impact, even if it's not guaranteed, like Dan said, it's a goal to work toward. The student also probably wants that goal to have some importance to him/her, to end the project with something interesting both in project form and in terms of knowledge. Essentially, then, I think it's about convincing students that this is not just a cool idea for the industry, it's also a cool PROJECT to work on, and they will get a lot from it, now and in the future.

~Mary Yovina

By Unknown, At April 1, 2009 at 7:03 PM

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

How the Hell do we Attract Students to our Breathtakingly Sexy Project?

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