Gamers Delight
A video game called “Closure” featuring a mysterious world plunged into darkness co-created by UMBC sophomore Jon Schubbe won an Independent Games Festival (IGF) award for “Excellence in Audio.”
The game was also nominated in two other categories out of six possible IGF honors: “Technical Excellence” and the “Nuovo Innovation Award.” Closure was co-created by Tyler Glaiel, a student at Digipen Institute of Technology in Washington state and Chris Rhyne, a game developer from California.
Closure is a 2-D puzzle platform game in which parts of the world in blackness don’t exist physically. Your character illuminates his immediate surroundings by carrying small orbs of light. Everything in light exists and everything in darkness is a void.
“It is impossible to overstate how big a deal this is. The IGF is the Sundance Film Festival of video game development and winning this award makes Jon a leading practitioner in his field,” said Neal McDonald, assistant professor of animation and interactive media in UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts.
Schubbe, a visual arts major with a concentration animation and interactive media, has been creating his own video games since he was 13. Winning the IGF award means he and his co-creators will likely be able to create a downloadable version playable on one of the three major video gaming consuls – the X-Box 360, Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii.
It’s a major coup for an undergraduate student, but Schubbe said that doesn’t mean he is aspiring to work for a major video game developer. His dream is to do art and animation for small independent game developers or small animation studios.
“In the game industry now a lot of the indie developers are afraid that the mainstream developers are pushing the market towards a Hollywood-style feel for just about every game,” said Schubbe. “Keeping creative control as an independent developer allows you to create games that don’t feel like they were churned out on an assembly line.”
Watch a demo video of “Closure” online.
(5/14/10)
