Bloomington group fights difficulties with video game

When Hoosier Games released Warp Shooter to the Xbox Live Indie Market on Aug. 29, the student organization quietly celebrated an accomplishment nearly one year in the making.

As of Wednesday, the game had received 650 trial downloads and 55 purchases. Destructoid.com’s Saturday Morning Hangover, a live show on the popular site for game reviews, reviewed the game Sept. 8.

Brendan Wood, a recent MS graduate of the IU telecommunications department’s audio and game design program, first pitched the game idea to Hoosier Games at the beginning of the 2011 academic year.

“I had the original idea to build off the dual stick shooter, similar to Geometry Wars, by adding warp movement and adding the appeal of a new type of movement,” Wood said.

Each semester, Hoosier Games brings students together from different schools and majors to assemble finished video games on a zero-dollar budget.

“Generally, making video games costs many thousands of dollars and can take years to produce,” Hoosier Games Executive Producer Nathan Finley said. “Hoosier Games makes everything without getting paid and aims to finish a game within a semester.”

Last year, Warp Shooter was one of the games selected to be developed.

Warp Shooter is a multiplayer dual stick shooter that allows players to jump through space using a warp beacon and emergency thrust during attacks.

The game is also three-vector, which allows players to move across three planes of movement.

“For some people this may be a little too complex at first to consider x, y and z (because) three-way movement has never been done before,” Wood said.

Players choose from a menu of customizable weapons, including an assortment of lasers, death rays, rockets and other power-ups, to destroy their opponents.

The game was developed by a team of eight Hoosier Games members during a 10-month period with Wood acting as the project’s creative director, document writer and audio lead.

“We had a lot of ideas of what we wanted to do with this design, but I had to choose what I thought was best for the game,” Wood said. “We brainstormed a lot of cool ideas, but I was concerned with getting a project done.”

By the end of the first semester the team had established a promising prototype, which Wood and three others then refined.

“Developing games is incredibly challenging,” Finley said. “It requires a lot of different, very specific skill groups. To make a game you need designers, artists, sound engineers and programmers. Very few games can be made without a group that collectively has all of these skills.”

In July, the game was published on the Indie online forum App Hub, where it was peer-reviewed by other independent developers. Wood said independently developed games must receive eight passing reviews to be released.

Wood said the first version of the game included a few bugs, which were fixed, and the game was republished and passed reviews in August.

Wood, who said he has not seen any game like Warp Shooter before, considered leading a kick-start campaign to raise awareness for the game. He believes that if Warp Shooter gets more downloads, the game could be developed further and have the potential to be picked up by Microsoft.

“With the amount of downloads so far, there’s not a critical audience here to keep up with developing the game,” Wood said.

Warp Shooter is available for download on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 80 Microsoft points, the equivalent of $1, with proceeds going to Hoosier Games to help fund projects, technology and marketing.

Wood said the game is difficult to find from the Xbox Live Dashboard, but to download the game just click on Games, Game Marketplace, Indie Game Marketplace and search for Warp Shooter.

Hoosier Games meets at 6:30 p.m. Mondays in Ballantine Hall 118, and Finley welcomes all interested students to attend.  

“The group is still young and we are always looking for interested students who are either experienced in, or would like to learn programming, art, sound and/or design,” Finley said.