"Arkadium has survived for the past decade by making casual games for the web and Facebook. But with the arms race going in games, that approach may not cut it anymore. So the New York game publisher is announcing today that it has hired industry veteran Stephen Jarrett as its vice president of game design. ...
The new hire goes with the strategy of moving up in games and making big investments in game platforms such as the upcoming Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft."
Abstract: "Serious games
can help
to improve efficacy of
motor
rehabilitation
especially in a home environment. We introduce
"
The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
,
a serious game
improving strength
and mobility of the shoulder area
targeting
support
of
supervised
phy
siotherapy
.
It proposes a customizable
environment
for
supplementary exercises in the context of rehabilitation for
a
one
-
sided Shoulder
-
Impingement
-
Syndrome.
We
introduce
the
medical background of the shoulder impingement syndrome,
how the game aims to im
prove the health status of the patients
through
several options of
exercises and how these exercises are
embedded into the flow of game play. We will further explain
how motivational factors are implemented and which additional
factors were relevant in the
design
process. As the game makes
use of motion tracking for input, we utilized
Microsoft Kinect as
a low
-
cost IO
device suitable for a
home
-
environment use case. "
Abstract: "D video games are getting popular in the world with the availability of advanced graphic cards, high
processing p
ower computers, high speed internet and smart sensing devices ranging from general mouse
to Microsoft Kinect. OpenGL is a popular graphics processing framework and it is being used by many
famous 3D video game design software as the back end framework. In
this paper we present our
experience with OpenGL based C++ implementation of a 3D first person shooting game. 3D
environment building, navigating, character animation, lighting, sound and shooting is described.
Specially OpenGL based concepts are discussed
for clear understanding of the concepts."
abstract: "This work focuses on the design and implementation of an educational game for deployment on the Xbox 360 commercial game console. Video games can be extremely powerful and effective learning tools when deployed with methodical precision. Currently, no learning tools are available for commercial consoles that focus on teaching core concepts in Engineering. This work presents an overall design for an educational game to address Number Systems in the scope of the Electrical and Computer Engineering curricula.
BINX is an educational adventure game designed to address Number Systems and their arithmetic operations in Digital Logic Design, a core course is Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. Object Oriented Design Principles were used in the development of this game. This work presents one sublevel implemented using the XNA framework - a Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK).The BINX gameplay takes place inside a computer where a malicious virus is threatening the computer's operability. The player has to find the virus and eradicate it by disconnecting the terminals of the graphics processor. The player has the opportunity to practice before taking on the Boss Challenge. In the practice phase, the player practices number conversions without fear of penalties. In the Challenge phase, the player is timed and has to perform the number conversions before the allotted time expires. The combination of practice and challenge provides players with the ability to practice number conversions and, when ready, to take on the challenge task where assessment is conducted to provide the player with the knowledge of how well he/she has performed on the challenge. The number conversion level of BINX was implemented and formally evaluated showing improvement in student scores after using BINX."
Abstract: "ideo games and other applications using off
-
the
-
shelf tracking
devices often take a simple approach to gesture and pose
recognition:
a recognized gesture is always mapped to the same
action
. This approach
basically turns a gesture into a binary button
pre
ss and
misses much of the nuance implicit in natural gestures.
In this paper we explore
,
in a game design setting
,
the use of
continuous 3D gesture sequences where
in
attributes of individual
gestures, such as speed, direction,
etc., combine to influence th
e
r
esult of the sequence as a whole
.
We present Pixelbending, a
game demo
built using the Microsoft Kinect and Unreal
Developers Kit (UDK)
in which the player performs Tai Chi
inspired movements to control water. Designed with the goal
of
creating a fun an
d engaging 3D game experience built
on a
nuanced gesture set, the demo was well received by many players
of different ages and sizes. Through the development process we
encountered challenges to working with off
-
the
-
shelf devices."
"In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles - also the first in years - though neither have confirmed it."
"Three years ago, PAX East came to Beantown. It landed at the Hynes Convention Center and was seen by many as the acknowledgement that Boston was a worthy adversary against the perceived dominance of the West Coast gaming giants. They had EA and Microsoft, we had Harmonix and Rockstar New England."
From the abstract: "A serious game for construction planning and scheduling education must
provide an authentic environment for gameplay. To achieve this requirement, the
game environment must be created from CAD drawings of a real project. The game
engine must have components for providing timely scaffolding and support to the
user. Storing the vast amount of data for a real project requires data structures
optimized for fast rendering at the same time easily accessing and manipulating
building elements and element data.
This paper discusses a game engine developed for creating construction
planning and scheduling educational games. The game engine is designed from
scratch for performance and flexibility. It includes a component for directly importing
data from a Revit model for building the game environment, interfaces Microsoft
Project for scheduling, includes a feedback module, and a scoring system for
measuring user performance."
"Abstract. While building a game engine in Microsoft XNA 4 that pow-
ered a RTS (real-time strategy) tower defense type game, we were faced
with the issue of increasing the amount of visual feedback received by the
player and adding value to the gameplay by creating a more immersive
atmosphere. This is a common goal shared by all games, and with the
recent advancements in graphics hardware (namely OpenGL, DirectX and
the advent of programmable shaders) it has become a necessity. In this pa-
per we will build upon the shadowing techniques known as VSM (variance
shadow map) and LVSM (layered variance shadow map) and discuss some
of the issues and optimizations we employed in order to add real-time soft
shadowing capabilities to our game engine."
Abstract: "Mobile gaming is a big driver of app marketplaces. However,
few mobile games deliver truly distinctive gameplay experi-
ences for ad hoc collocated users. As an example of such an
experience, consider a sword ght dual between two users
facing each other where each user's phone simulates a sword.
With phone in hand, the users' thrusts and blocks translate
to attacks and counterattacks in the game. Such Phone-to-
Phone Mobile Motion Games (MMG) represent interesting
and novel gameplay for ad hoc users in the same location.
One enabler for anMMG game like sword ght is continuous,
accurate distance ranging. Existing ranging schemes cannot
meet the stringent requirements of MMG games: speed, ac-
curacy and noise robustness. In this work, we design FAR,
a new ranging scheme that can localize at 12Hz with 2cm
median error while withstanding up to 0dB noise, multipath
and Doppler eect issues. Our implementation runs on com-
modity smartphones and does not require any external in-
frastructure. Moreover, distance measurement accuracy is
comparable to that of Kinect, a xed-infrastructure motion
capture system. Evaluation on users playing two prototype
games indicate that FAR can fully support dynamic game
motion in real-time."
Abstract: "Combiform is a novel digital gaming console featuring four combinable handheld controllers. It is a new and unique tangible gaming interface that stresses the importance of co-located, co-attentive social interactions among players. In particular, multiple players may freely combine and lock together their handheld game controllers, thereby creating a very flexible collective and transformable tangible interface. Combiform emphasizes social interaction through controller-to-controller contact. The platform and its 10 games introduce novel, tangible and physical co-attentive experiences that are not found in traditional co-located gaming platforms using mimetic interfaces (e.g. Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect). The project is the first game console especially designed for a new emerging digital game genre - Communal Casual Game. The new game genre captures a perspective of integrating classical folk game design approach with digital elements"
"SmartGlass, a software-based application that extends Xbox 360 experiences onto smartphones and tablets, does shine best when paired with television or movie entertainment. That's where programmers have fleshed out the most whiz-bang features at this time, but game designers have clever plans for this tech, too."