A team of eight Concordia University students have created their own video game with help from UBISOFT mentors.
The game, Rock ‘n’ Mole, has gamers play as rock golems who must save families of moles from being eaten by foxes or falling off platforms by using their resources. The surviving family tree of moles affects each level.
Rock ‘n’ Mole originally began as a submission for the 2020 UBISOFT Game Lab Competition, but is now a labour of love since the competition was cancelled due to COVID-19.
The annual competition, which launched its 10th year in January, provided teams of university students a structured experience to develop a playable video game prototype. This year’s theme ‘generation’ inspired the students’ 10 weeks of work, with guidance from two UBISOFT mentors.
The games produced by 20 participating teams from 10 Quebec universities were supposed to be presented to a jury who would have awarded the winners $22,000 in scholarship funds and at least 10 internship opportunities.
UBISOFT said it made the decision to cancel the competition since many teams lost access to necessary equipment when the pandemic shut down universities.
“It was understandable but disappointing, mainly because the students were looking forward to it so much,” faculty supervisor for the Concordia student team Dr. Sudhir Mudur said.
“In the circumstances with no face-to-face meetings possible, the cancellation was unavoidable,” he added. “There was not adequate time to change the evaluation format to a virtual one.”
Dr. Mudur along with Dr. Pippin Barr of Concordia University served as the faculty supervisors for the group of engineering, computer science, and fine arts students, named Team Concordia-2.
“We really wanted to try to respond to the theme of the competition as best as we could, so our decision really stemmed from the word ‘generation,’” Sylvain Tran, the lead game design and level design team member, said.
Students said working with UBISOFT mentors Mariana Turchiari-Boucault and Raphael Lapierre, whom they met on a biweekly basis at the university, was an invaluable resource.
“This is my second year doing the Game Lab [competition], the mentors are super experienced and have worked on huge games, which is cool and they gave us feedback directly on the game which was super useful,” Smith said.
He added that it was this guidance which made the competition such a rare and engaging opportunity for students. When the opportunity to interact with a real company dissolved due to COVID-19, he said students struggled to stay engaged.
“As soon as quarantine started, finding motivation and a structure for the group became super difficult,” Smith said.
Despite the challenges Team Concordia-2 faced, Rock ‘n’ Mole became a passion project.
“We wanted to see the finished product, even if we didn’t have the rewards from the competition anymore,” Tran said. “We worked hard on it throughout the semester, so we just wanted to finish it so we could be proud of what we’ve been working on.”
Tran added the team found a renewed sense of inspiration when the reward structure of the competition fell apart during the pandemic.
“You kind of get the chance to examine why you’re doing things,” he said. “It really highlighted how human game design is, it’s not just about codes and numbers, it’s really a social exchange of ideas.”
According to Tran, the team is planning to publish Rock ‘n’ Mole on the indie game-sharing platform itch.io once it is completed. Until then, there are still a lot of things they would like to work on as a team.
Featured image provided by Fredrick Tendong via Unsplash.
