Team Steel takes 5th in Heavy Metal Challenge
Last weekend I took part in the Heavy Metal: Amped on Wind Power challenge at the Boston Museum of Science. It’s an incredible one day engineering challenge in which high schoolers from all across the US meet up, are randomly broken into teams, and have to rapidly design, prototype, test, and build a huge mechanical structure to lift a giant metal trash can three stories into the air using nothing but wind power. The competition was a ton of fun, and I was assigned as a mentor to Team Steel, the most hard core group at the event. As such I gave them guidance and advice for what to do, but the team actually came up with and implemented the awesome device you see above. And it’s a good thing too, since they had much better ideas than I would have ever had.
We had few materials (mostly cardboard, duct tape, and pvc piping), and our only power source were two giant fans blowing hurricane gusts. After a lot of discussion and failed designs the team settled on the waterwheel device you see above. The cups on the bottom would catch the wind, spinning the whole device around an axle made out of two cardboard tubes coated with torn up trash bags to decrease friction. As it spun it would wind up a rope which was attached to the trash can through a pulley, hoisting it to the ceiling.
So how’d we do? Pretty damn well! We raised the trash can the full 27.6 feet in only 83 seconds earning us 5th place out of 32 teams. Only 11 teams raised the can the entire distance, so it was quite an accomplishment (the winning team shattered the previous record, finishing in 29 seconds. Wow!). The most impressive part in my mind though was how the team iterated on design after testing, and how quickly they settled on an idea to try instead of debating endlessly. Hopefully some of these super talented kids will wind up getting interested in game development!
July 6, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Random
Tags: air power, competition, design, engineering, fans, heavy metal, high school, museum, science, steel, waterwheel
Words of Wisdom: Prototyping – Do it Quick + Dirty
Sande Chen recently asked me to a guest post for her monthly blog on game design. I was happy to help, and honestly a little bit flattered/stupefied that she would even ask me to help. Nevertheless I was happy to help, and I’ve copied the entire post below. It’s a bit of a how to on video game prototyping, with emphasis on getting shit done and why this is important. Enjoy!
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So you’ve got an idea for a game, but you’re missing an artist, you don’t have the design nailed down, you need to find funding, and you don’t know what platform you’re going to develop for, you’re not sure that the concept is even feasible, or you [insert development hurdle of your choice here]. How do you even start? With prototyping!
Prototyping is the process of making a small, crappy, slapped-together version that demonstrates certain key aspects of your final vision. It’s a great way to start making games since it is far less daunting, and during the process you’ll learn a lot about what you should actually do in the full version. Prototypes are throw away, but that’s a good thing since it’ll give you more freedom to experiment in ways you might not normally try.
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June 10, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Words of Wisdom
Tags: chen, design, how to, prototype, prototyping, sande
GDC 2009: Talking the Talk (Part 1 of 2)
I wrote this article for Henry Jenkins, and am reprinting it here for you. Enjoy!
Hi Everyone! Henry, thanks for inviting me back for my annual round up of all the interesting things that happened this year at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). For those of you who are reading my posts for the first time I’m Eitan, local Boston game nerd and developer. I used to be a grad student at MIT doing games research, and now I’m the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games.
But enough about me, let’s talk about games! This year I’ll be doing two posts: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk. The first (today’s post) will be all about interesting talks, lectures, rants, and totally inappropriate outbursts heard at the conference. The next post will be all about the amazing developers I was lucky enough to meet who are making things happen. So let’s get started – what was awesome?
Usability, Motherfuckers!
Sure, it’s a little self serving to talk about your own session first, but it was a damn good talk and I want you to hear about it. A lot of people out there can’t play video games due to some sort of disability (this applies to computer systems in general). However, with a bit of extra thought and planning game developers can frequently make their titles work for many of these disabled groups, and in the process make their game more usable for everyone. This can even lead to increased sales, so spending money on making a game highly usable will often earn money! I covered a bunch of concrete tips for things that developers can do to make their games more usable, and pointed out examples of games that exemplify this behavior (like Half Life 2 and Peggle) and games that could do so much more (like Trespasser and Puzzle Quest). If this sounds interesting you can grab the slide deck here.