There is a civil war brewing deep inside the head of graduate student Steve Cornett, with monsters, heroes, princes, emperors, demons and dragons all waging battle. But there is also a 200-page document he's virtually memorized detailing how those fantastic creatures and causes fit together in a massive digital card game he's developing. In the end, they will leave his head as "Guardians of Kelthas," a game in the vein of "Magic: The Gathering," but with the added technology and interactivity of a computer.\nCornett and a team of more than 20 students are developing the game together -- from sketching the various villains, creatures and landscapes to composing theme music to programming the code to voicing the characters. After nine months of work and more hours than Cornett cares to count, it's still a long way from completion. But Cornett, who is an avid fan of fantasy literature and computer and role-playing games, wouldn't want it any other way. \n"I think I was hooked on the first computer game I played," he said. "We got an old Mac when I was 4 or 5 and I tried the first couple of early games and really enjoyed them. I haven't ever really considered another career path."
Building a game\nCornett came to IU to enroll in the individualized major program as a game designer, but "Guardians" actually got its start in 2003. Cornett had to produce a game for the final project of a Telecommunications class. The result -- Heroes Inc. -- ended up winning an award at the annual IDEAS Festival hosted by the school. \nOver the summer, Cornett and his partner, senior Mike Green, decided to start the project up again, but to make it bigger and better. The two recruited a team of artists and programmers and met twice a week, taking Cornett's ideas and discussing and debating them until the game's design took shape.\nA digital card game was the obvious choice, Cornett said, because it was a project big enough to challenge the team, but small enough for them to actually achieve. \n"You can't produce 'World of Warcraft' with a team of 20 students," he said. "You'd need 50 professionals working 'round the clock for two years and that just isn't going to happen. But a card game is something that can be reasonably produced by a modest number of people in their spare time. And it's still something we can be proud of in the end, because it really is going to be a substantial game."\nThom Gillespie, director of the Masters in Immersive Mediated Environments program in the department of telecommunications, is Cornett's faculty sponsor. Gillespie is thrilled with Cornett's accomplishments and thinks they could ultimately land him in rather esteemed company. \n"If he pulls this off, he won't ever work for a game company," Gillespie said. "He becomes a game company."\nAs for the storyline itself, conceived by Cornett and sculpted by the whole team, it is complicated to say the least. Users interested in a full rundown can find it at the game's Web site, Kelthas.com, but essentially, the emperor of Kelthas has died and a civil war erupts among his heirs. This leaves ordinary citizens at the mercy of monsters and bandits, prompting the creation of Hero Companies which provide protection. The user becomes one of the Hero Companies and battles the competition in one phase and becomes involved in a plot to kidnap an heir in another. \n"The stories just kind of come to me naturally," Cornett said. "I've read a lot of fantasy and science fiction literature. Reading that kind of thing is one of my few hobbies. And I'm just accustomed to the kind of things that are possible in these worlds."
Digital Developments\nDeveloping "Guardians" for a computer actually opened a number of doors for Cornett and his team. The format allows for a pioneering artificially intelligent computer player, random game functions, different interfaces for different users and a slew of other digital-only options. \n"If you want to play an analog card game, go play 'Magic' -- most of us do," Cornett said. "But, as far as a digital card game, we can have things like randomness or asymmetric knowledge where one player may know things that another player doesn't know. Whereas in a real card game, obviously everyone is sitting at a table. If one card is exposed, everybody's going to know it."\nThe digital arena also means voice actors play different parts in the game and musicians provide accompanying music. IU graduate Charlie Hoyt works on the non-linear music -- that's accompaniment that mirrors how a player is doing in the game, the terrain he's in, how much money he has and all kinds of other variables.\n"We're doing something kind of special in that it's not so much linear music like you'd have in a film," he said. "If the player is doing well, then the music gets a little happier. If the player is doing poorly, if the player's health isn't as high as the monster's health, then the music gets heavier and more sad. You can play the game twice and have a completely different sonic experience each time."\nThe storyline is told through sequences and characters interwoven through the gameplay and on the cards. That's where the 2-D art comes in -- drawn by a team of artists ranging from IU students to one volunteer artist who lives in Scotland. Green is one of the artists and he said he works 10 to 15 hours sketching images and coloring them in on computers. The job requires a lot of time, but also gives the team a lot of artistic freedom to draw what they like.\n"Half our stuff is all concept, so we'll spend hours on something and it will totally get scratched," Green said. "But that's fine by me -- it prepares you for working in the future."\nA five-member team of programmers ties everything together -- coding the game so the acting, music and cards all interact with each other. \n"I hear basically what everyone wants it to look like and how it's supposed to be laid out," said Will Ryan, a graduate student on the programming team. "Then, I actually go try and do it on my own time. So, in random hours when I get some spare moments I hack things together and see if it works."
The next big thing\nThe game will initially compete in IU's Ideas Festival in April. Then, it will be entered into the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco, possibly competing for tens of thousands of dollars in prize money and the attention of corporate game buyers. \n"That's the equivalent of submitting a film to Sundance," Gillespie said. "This is like nothing I've seen at IU anywhere. It's spectacular."\nCornett said that's all many more hours of hard work away, though it would be a great accomplishment if the game took off. \n"It'd be terrific if it did," Cornett said. "It would be really nice if we could get into the professional competition, but it really will require a lot of effort. We're up against teams with million dollar budgets. It's difficult to compete with that."\nDifficulty, though, hasn't stopped Cornett and his team from getting this far. And that, he said, is perhaps what makes it worthwhile. \n"It's challenging," he said. "But it's the kind of challenge that I've been looking for"
