The game design and development programs at UW-Stout will be back in the national spotlight this year with a return trip to the Intel University Games Showcase and Expo in San Francisco.
Last year, UW-Stout’s student-designed video game Everend brought home one of three national awards, Best Visual Quality. As a result, the university earned an automatic berth at this year’s showcase, which is by invitation only.
This year’s UW-Stout entry will be Sun of the Children, largely created by Hue Vang, of Two Rivers, who graduated in December with a Master of Fine Arts in design.
Two other students, including Vang’s brother Chuewa, of Two Rivers, a computer science-game design student, and Kayla Techmeier, of De Pere, a game design-art student, helped with the programming and 3D modeling/animation, respectively. A fourth member of the team, Sou Yang, who is not a UW-Stout student, helped with the game’s music.
Hue Vang also was on last year’s Everend team.
“The team we put together has worked really well together,” said Associate Professor Andrew Williams, director of the game design-art program who is advising the team and will be attending as a speaker.
The game is “based on a mix of mythology and culture. It looks at the story between two beings, one made of stardust and the other of grass and aquatic material. The beings are separated and united at the end,” Williams said.
“As the characters get further apart the world becomes desaturated, and when they’re together the world is vibrant. It about visuals and exploring the ideas of longing and using color and music as a way to express that,” Williams said.
The Intel-sponsored competition will include an afternoon expo, with 20 universities displaying their games, and culminate with awards Thursday night, March 22. Teams will make a five-minute formal presentation of their game.
The Intel competition coincides with the international Game Developers Conference March 19-23. Last year’s event drew about 26,000 people from the video game design world.
From UW-Stout, more than 50 people plan to attend, mostly students and three professors. One group will be traveling by train and taking part in Train Jam, a 52-hour game design challenge.
Williams has been invited to make two presentations, one about using art history methodologies to analyze video games and another about the importance of game history. In 2017, Williams’ book “History of Digital Games: Developments in Art, Design and Interaction” was published by CRC Press.
UW-Stout’s game design programs were named a national co-champion in 2013 at the Entertainment Software Association competition in Los Angeles. The programs, one based in art and another with a computer science focus, were ranked 15th nationally in 2017 by Princeton Review.
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Photos
Hue Vang, who created Sun of the Children, works in a UW-Stout game design lab.
Andrew Williams
