A team of three graduates and one current student of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s Game Art Design program captured first place in the marathon Wild Pockets Game Jam. The competition fielded 18 teams drawn from 76 gamers who participated.
The four self-described “good friends for a long time from the Art Institute,” Matt DeLucas, Daniel Dewire, Victor George, and Nick McClay, created Miner Mania during the round-the-clock, 24-hour session that began at noon on Saturday and continued through the night to noon Sunday.
Competing teams created video games with the 3-D Wild Pockets online game engine. Sim Ops Studios, a company started by former CMU students, created Wild Pockets and is beta testing through a series of game jams in several U.S. cities before the game engine’s full release next year.
A total of 14 video games were submitted to judges at the end of the bleary-eyed competition, during which each team conceived, planned, designed, engineered, and compiled a game for casual play. The winning game features the figure of a miner collecting crystals inside a maze of concentric tunnels rotating within a planetary sphere. The game challenges the player to collect as many crystals as possible while moving the miner toward the surface of the planet through openings in the maze.
Second and third place winners were Asteroid Apocalypse, a rescue game, and Happy Happy Doom Fall, a gravity challenge, both created by teams from CMU’s Masters of Entertainment Technology program.
Source: Wild Pockets, Game Jam contestants
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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