University of Idaho (UI) Video Game Studio Sees Success With First PC Product
Video games are a billion dollar industry, but to a group of University of Idaho students that industry is also their preferred classroom.
On Feb. 13, the day after Darwin's Day, a collection of students released their first full-length PC game called "Darwin's Demons" to the world.
The students and two professors form an on-campus video game studio called Polymorphic Games. The 3-year-old video studio is funded by the UI and the National Science Foundation and housed in the campus's new Integrated Research and Innovation Center. While it's a subsidiary of the UI, it operates like an independent business where they can develop and sell a product to the masses.
"Darwin's Demons" was the culmination of nearly a year of work by more than 20 students in academic fields as diverse as art, computer science, business and music.
"A lot of universities wouldn't go for something like this," professor of biological sciences Barrie Robison said about the video game-based learning environment.
Robison partnered with Terry Soule, a professor of computer science, three years ago with the idea of combining education with video game design, and they pitched it to the university as an environment where students from multiple disciplines could work on real projects in a real world environment, Soule said.
The university liked their idea, as did the NSF's BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, which provided the studio grant money as well.
A team of 12 students did the bulk of the work on "Darwin's Demons" this past summer. As the name suggests, the game is an ode to Charles Darwin by incorporating his theory of evolution. As the player, who uses a spaceship to destroy enemies, progresses in the game, the enemies evolve and adapt, becoming more advanced and difficult to destroy.
This evolution separates "Darwin's Demons" from many other games, where the bad guys are unchanging.
Kirsten Way, a senior working on a finance degree, is an avid gamer who was drawn to the studio because of that concept of evolving enemies.
"Knowing that there was a studio trying to capture that was really exciting to me," Way said.
Way led a team of business students that earned second place and $1,000 for the studio by showcasing the game in the 2016 Idaho Pitch competition. During the competition, where student entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to judges, the team explained the benefits of the game both as a business idea and a learning experience.
"It's not just beneficial monetarily, but beneficial to the campus overall," Way said.
Robison said the studio could be used as a recruiting tool for the UI, and as a center for students from multiple disciplines to work together.
"It's not just about making a game and selling it," Robison said, adding he and Soule will continue to seek grants to keep the studio running in the years ahead. They hope to release an evolution-based game every year on Darwin's Day.
Nearly a month after "Darwin's Demons" was released on the popular online PC game distributor Steam, Robison said he expects sales to surpass 500 copies by this coming week. The average Steam game sells 32,000 copies over its lifetime, Way said.
Soule said Polymorphic Games first had to submit Steam a demo, which had to be voted on by the Steam community before the game could be released. During that process, the students learned to market the game with trailers and to use coding so the game could track high scores.
Robison said Steam games can't be released on a Sunday, which is why they had to wait until the day after Darwin's Day this year. But while Robison and his team can't help but check sales numbers "religiously," there's more to the studio than that.
"The main goal is to have an environment that students can work and learn in," Soule said.
Source: http://www.uidaho.edu/news/news-articles/media-coverage/2017-spring/030417-studentgamers
This article was originally written by Anthony Kuipers and published in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News on Saturday, March 4, 2017.
