It's winter break and you'd think I'd be kicking back, drinking out juice out of exotic fruits in the harsh cold of Boston but NO! Instead I am working on a prototype for the Ubisoft Game Lab competition that the EAE program was invited to participate in. My team is one of four competing to represent the UofU in the final competition at Ubisoft Montreal. There are about 17 other schools also entering into the competition but we are the only participant from the United States! What is my team's idea you ask? Read on to find out!So my team comprises up of 7 people including myself. Here is are my team members and our roles.
Engineers: Nikhil Raktale, Jason Kanagaratam, Miao "Max" Xu, and Cody Hansen.
Artist: Isaac Kellis
Designers: Jason Thummel and Myself.
Together we have come up with an interesting survival/exploration game that we have codenamed, Cleanse. The game is about a Researcher who wakes up from an explosion and finds themselves lost in an alien jungle that is glowing in bio-luminescence. In the darkness, the jungle looks faintly like swirling galaxies and constellations due to the plant's unique make-up. While in the jungle, the Researcher is being hunted by a dangerous predator known as Space, who has corrupted the indigenous life under its control. Dressed in an experimental power-suit, the Researcher must use their weaponized head-mounted flashlight to fight Space's minions and find some way off of the planet. The razor that we developed for Cleanse is "Alan Wake meets Dead Space in a bio-luminescent alien jungle." We felt this best capture that tense exploratory experience that we wanted players to have.
The team is showing great progress on the game with our prototype about half-way done. Although the final project (if we get picked to represent the EAE program) will be made in UDK, we are protyping in Unity for now. Right now we have the flashlight combat working but we still need to finish up some level designs and implement the art style in there as well. I'm looking forward to the latter part especially.
I'll update as soon as we get some more content on the project.
Happy Holidays to all!
-Andrew
