2012 marks the fourth year Vancouver Film School has offered the Women in Games Scholarship, opening up more opportunities for women in Game Design, and in those four years we’ve seen an impressive roster of diverse winners. Shannon Lee, the inaugural winner, hails from Vancouver, although the prize found her in Japan; she is now at BigPark innovating with Kinect. Second-year winner Annie Dickerson is a native of Washington State, and a former elementary school teacher, and currently works for East Side Games. Larissa Baptista from Brazil was the third recipient, and was recently featured with her final project team on CBC television.

Kristina Soltvedt Wiik, this year’s winner, hails from Norway, and arrives at VFS having worked for three years as a journalist for Gamereactor Magazine. Kristina is especially interested in the narrative possibilities of games, and has already worked as a Narrative Designer on a PC game developed in Vancouver.

“It is a tremendous privilege to be awarded such a coveted scholarship,” Kristina says, “and I can’t help but be excited at the possibility of realizing my dreams. I’m really looking forward to the year ahead of me, and the ensuing opportunities my year at VFS will surely offer.”

Congratulations, Kristina!

Take your most stressful job interview, have it happen on a stage in front of an audience of industry professionals, and add a performance of you demonstrating your skills, and you have some sense of what students go through during Game Design‘s industry presentation night. Somehow, though, the teams still seem to be having fun, a testimony to the passion they have for the games they created.

Terra, a multi-level, action platformer, is brought to us by the three-person team of Juan Salvador Diaz Neto, Carson Steinmann, and Marty McKay. You advance through the cel-shaded world by flinging both you and your enemies around with special jump pads; there is a visceral satisfaction in watching a pesky nemesis fly away into space. Players are guided by the subtle use of colour to keep them on track, with on-screen cues kept to a minimum to better showcase the artwork. Stay away from the edges of the final level, though – that’s quite a fall.

If you try and raise the perfect child and she doesn’t work out, what do you do? Place her in a giant, complicated 3D puzzle/platformer of course! Otherside — by Noushin Bardi, Truong To, Drew MacPherson, Erlend Sogge Heggen, Lanie Galupe, and Jacob Rehlander — has you playing as the disappointing child, who must manipulate her world to escape. Puzzles are solved by rotating and shifting cubes, the camera panning in and out to provide better context for your actions. The narrative of the game progresses through recorded snippets by your parents, wondering where it all went wrong.

In Terminus Station you are a journalist with unusual magical powers, who finds herself teleported to a cursed subway station overrun by monsters. The game, designed for the iPad, is the brainchild of Mario Granillo, Eric Gertzbein, Ryan Bradstock, Matthew Cleary, and Riley Godard, and uses a gesture-based system for casting spells. Throwing flaming boxes into slowly stumbling monsters really never gets old. With the success of games like Angry Birds (140 million downloads and counting), expect more mobile projects from Game Design.

Afraid of the dark? There & Back takes that primal fear and generates an entire world from it, pulling your character into the darkness with only a lantern to protect you. Luckily, Dominic O’Grady, Randall Barilea, Oscar Aguirre, and Jordan Fiander have given you the ability to use that lantern to change places with your shadow, shooting you back and forth across increasingly more difficult levels. How difficult depends on your ability to factor in multiple dangers at once. During the demo, the last level playthrough lasted about thirty seconds before the player was crushed under unforgiving gears.

Not presenting that night but worth looking out for are Bit Siege, mech combat from the minds of Fred Jarrett, Joshua Billups, Aaron Dunn, Geoff Thew, and Dalton Moser, and solo projects Real Fighter, by Tom Huang, and Shotcaller, by Leo Ing.

Well done, everyone!

If your interaction with videogames is non-existent, you’d be forgiven for thinking that game protagonists only range from “large man with a gun” to “large man with a sword”. But students in VFS Game Design are challenging the traditional hero, following in the footsteps of visionary games like Okami, Psychonauts, and even Pac-Man.

One vastly under-represented group in gaming are protagonists with physical disabilities. So when Team Pixel Pi designed its final student project, Pulse, around a visually-impaired hero, it started to attract serious attention – including a crew from the CBC. The team and its game were featured on a recent newscast, which you can watch here or on the CBC website.

We caught up with the members of Team Pixel Pi to get a deeper look at their design process.

Team Pixel Pi is

Larissa Fuchs – Project Manager & Artist
Leanne Roed – Level Scripter & Effects Artist
Maxwell Hannaman – Programmer
Michael Cooper – Environmental Design
Richard Harrison – Level Design

Where did inspiration for the game come from? What motivated you to consider a sight-impaired protagonist?

Team Pixel Pi: During our brainstorming sessions we talked about images and videos that had inspired us in the past. One of the videos mentioned was Out of Sight, a five minute short film that features a little girl with a unique view of her surroundings. The video inspired us to take sound as a game mechanic; the game’s goal was to create a menacing atmosphere with an unconventional approach to navigation challenges. By limiting the information gamers take for granted they have the opportunity to experience a world through a new perspective. It was not until later in the process that we realized having a sight-impaired protagonist would naturally fit our focus on immersion rather than combat, which in turn blossomed into a motivating heroic journey.

During development what was the biggest concern? Is the product as it currently stands what you first envisioned?

Team Pixel Pi: Obvious challenges are imposed when things are constantly disappearing from the player’s view. In the absence of sound the player is blind, but with too much sound the player is vulnerable; finding a balance between these is a big concern, as well as guiding and orientating the player through this journey. We’ll be using this balance to our favor in the production months ahead and create many tense moments which play with the player’s senses.

We’ve seen quite a few games recently with more diverse protagonists. Is there a hero you’d like to see that hasn’t been tackled yet?

Team Pixel Pi: It’s hard to say that any hero is unique – they’ve been around for centuries in one form or another. When attempting to create an interesting protagonist nowadays the challenges lie more on creating unique mixtures of known qualities than bringing forth something completely original.

In our game we portray a blind girl named Eva, strong at heart, who does not have the physical capacity to confront the threats of the land. We think she’s an interesting protagonist that hasn’t been uniquely tackled in mass-consumption media. Like many blind people, Eva has been told that she is incapable of the independence expected of her peers. Not only does Eva prove her capability, but also her creativity and bravery by the end of the game.

What are your future goals?

Team Pixel Pi: We’re on the lookout for the possibility of developing the game further and releasing it to a larger community, sharing the experience with a broader audience. All of the members of Team Pixel π believe that games are more than just fun; they are engaging experiences. Our ultimate goal is to continue working on games that challenge us creatively, just as this project has done for us.

Thanks, everyone!

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Game Design Expo Scholarships! The scholarships were generously provided by our Game Design Expo sponsors.

Shane O’Connor – G4TechTV – $7,000
Victor Valdes – Radical Entertainment – $2,500
Kaue Rosa – Slant Six Games – $2,500
Alexander Mueller – Annex Pro – $2,000
RuiJie Zhou – Microsoft BigPark – $1,000

“I was happy just discovering my passion for game design,” said G4TechTV winner, Shane O’Connor. “Most people don’t get the chance to discover what they love, let alone pursue it within an environment as enriching as what we’re provided with here at VFS. Injecting a scholarship into that is surreal. I’ve been acknowledged in a powerful way, and now I’m more motivated than ever. I can’t wait to give back to the industry and community that turned my life around. Thank you so much.”

Congratulations to all winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors!

Last year we told you about Forerunner, the iOS game designed by a team of five Game Design grads and their friend. Well, this year is barely two months old and already a team of students has taken their mid-term assignment all the way to the App Store.

Students Ryan Cramer, Marc St. Onge, and Ben Kanbour conceived of Gravitilt in their Flash class for an assignment, but mobile devices were on their mind early. All three provided the following answers.

When you started making Gravitilt, did you know you were going to try and get it on the App Store?

Our original goal was to get a game working on the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. Uploading Gravitilt to the App Store was a stretch goal of ours as we decided that we would only submit it if we were proud of what we had created, and if we had time to fit it in with our class schedule. Once we completed Gravitilt and received feedback from our classmates, we very quickly decided to try to get it on the App Store.

In simple terms, if you can, lead us through what’s involved in getting a Flash game to play nice with iOS.

Getting Gravitilt onto iOS devices presented our team with some very interesting challenges. In order for us to even test our game on the iPad, we had to pay Apple for a Developer Account and then link specific devices to that account. Then we had to get development keys for our development machines (i.e., school computers) in order for them to run and build our code. Without this, the devices were unable to receive the game.

The biggest hurdle was the optimization of our game for iOS devices. We were using very powerful computers to build our game, so we were unaware of how well it would run. As such, Gravitilt had severe frame rate issues on the iPad, to the point that it was unplayable. To get around this issue we placed a limit on the number of movable blocks in each level. During testing we also saw that laying the device flat on a table, say, to rest your hands, would confuse the accelerometer, so we had to account for that in our design.

Once our game was done and handed in for our class assignment, we began the process of uploading Gravitilt to the App Store. This required us to redo the provisioning of our devices and also get distribution keys to replace the development keys. Once that was done we built a final version on our school PCs but were unable to submit it to the store. Apple requires the use of their machines to upload games. We took our game home and used an iMac to submit it to the store, at which point our status became “Waiting for Review”. We submitted our game on February 24, and it wasn’t reviewed and released by Apple until March 1.We immediately submitted an update to fix an issue, and that update is still “Waiting for Review”.

What was your inspiration for the game? What can players expect?

We wanted to make a game that was fun to play using the mobile device’s unique hardware features such as the accelerometer and touch screen, and we also wanted players to experience the joy of creating their own levels. Players can expect a game with simple mechanics but plenty of depth.

Anything you wish you’d done differently? What was the hardest part? What, if anything, was a pleasant surprise?

Testing. You can never figure out what isn’t working the way you expected without constantly testing it, as well as having people who have never seen it before test it. More testing may have prevented the need for an update immediately after release. We also wanted to have more puzzles for the player. We were pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to expand the quantity of the levels as we originally had only ten in mind, and we were able to double that amount in just a few days.

Thanks, guys!

You can download Gravitilt now from the App Store and the Android Market.