Digipen Games

[Mr. Krystal]

For those of you who don't know, I'm going to school at Digipen now. Digipen is the world's first "video game college" specializing in turning out people capable of making video games from start to finish. I'm in the master's program, and I got my first real game assignment last night. I have to make a Bejeweled clone in about 2.5 weeks. Shouldn't be too hard.

Anyway, I wanted to let you guys know about a couple of other student projects that might interest you. First off, you all know about Portal, right? It's the Half-Life-based puzzle game that allows you to put portals on walls, ceilings, and floors and go through them at any time with realistic physics and mind-bending complexity. Well, I learned the other day that it was actually an idea by a Digipen team! They created a game that functions pretty much exactly the same way as Portal back in 2004. It was called Narbacular Drop. When Valve saw the demo, they hired the whole student team, where they later were the core team to create and finish Portal. All of Digipen's games are available for free download, so if you can't wait for Portal to come out, try out the original.

http://www.digipen.edu/GameGallery/websites/NarbacularDrop/index.html

Then, couple of days ago, I was walking though the lobby, and someone was playing on the computer they have set up, showcasing students' games. It looked interesting and had a good soundtrack, so later, I went there myself and tried it out. It's an utterly fantastic game idea called Synaesthete. Basically, you combine a platformer with DDR. There's a character who you move around the world areas. When you're in a room with enemies, semi-transparent tiles start falling from the top of the screen. They are in time with the music. If you push other keys in time with the music and with the corresponding bar, you do an attack of some kind. There are usually tons of enemies, so you have to handle the complexity of dodging enemy attacks WHILE grooving to the music. Even better, the visuals look like something out of a abstract techno rave dream and the music appears to change based on how you play. The thing is, this only version 0.3, a functioning demo with two levels. It's not even finished. I'm addicted. Download it and play it now, you will not regret the experience.

http://synaesthetegame.com/

Here's a video of one of the levels (not in the demo, but similar to level 1):

[foxbird22]

I...whoa...awesome music...

Nobody will be able to find me tomorrow, I'll be addicted to that game!