The video game craze, which occupied the free time of young kids throughout the nineties, has continued for SMU graduate student Josh Szepietowski. His video game creation, “Invalid Tangram,” earned him an award at the Independent Game Festival.
Inspired by the well-known Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Game Festival was created in 1998 with the goal of recognizing the best independent video-game developers. Szepietowski, who will graduate in March, has been chosen the winner out of more than 100 game submissions. He accepted his award yesterday.
Szepietowski is currently working on an Invalid Tangram port for the Nintendo D.S. and has revealed that the port will take advantage of the hand-held system’s unique hardware. It’s set to include wireless multi-player modes and a worldwide high score ladder.
The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University is the premier graduate video game education program in the United States. The program, which offers a graduate certificate and Master’s of Science degree in interactive technology, has a placement rate of over 95 percent and has landed its former students into more than 50 of the world’s leading video-game companies.
According to Executive Director of the Guildhall at SMU Peter Raad, students create three fully functional 2-D and 3-D games during their 21 months of study with the program.
“By working in cross-disciplinary teams, our students hone their technical skills and develop their team-oriented mindset, allowing them to gain the experience of the pace and the style of real-world game development,” Raad said. “The quality of the resulting games is validated by our students being honored by IGF.”
Other Guildhall graduate students have also been honored by IGF for their creation of Weekday Warrior, which was named the best single-player first-person shooter modification and an alteration to an existing video game.
The IGF web site describes the game as “a total conversion mod in the vein of old-school adventure games.” The student-created Weekday Warrior takes place inside a modern corporate office environment, where players have the opportunity to play games such as office golf, darts and trashcan basketball.
Over their graduate career at the Guildhall, SMU students, including James Beech, Ian Childs, John Cipriano, Andrew Coggin, Ryan Dunagan, Philip Escobedo, Gohar Kanungo, Hilary Kauder, Jim Kneuper, Phillip Littman, Robert Midlil, Paul Ohanian, Tom Parker and Bobby Simpson, formed the popular Cut Corner Company Productions (CCCP).
After graduating from SMU, CCCP members went to work for companies in half a dozen major cities, and some team members are scheduled to represent their game at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this March.
