WAY wins "Game of the Year" at Games For Change!

WAY has just won the award for "Game of the Year" at the Games For Change festival! We also won for "Most Innovative Game" and were nominated for "Best Gameplay". I'm incredibly proud of my whole team.

Source: http://www.gamesforchange.org/press_releases/games-for-change-awards-culminate-9th-annual-games-for-change-festival-in-nyc/

WAY is a double-nominee at Games For Change!

My game WAY is a double-nominee at the Games For Change festival. We're up for "Most Innovative Game" and "Best Gameplay". Oh, and apparently all nominees are also up for "Game of the Year".

I'm crossing my fingers! Future Walt is amazed that crossing his fingers actually worked and plans to do more finger-crossing in the future's future.

Source: http://www.gamesforchange.org/2012/05/2012-games-for-change-awards-nominees-announced/

WAY Statistics

About a week ago we had an explosion of people playing WAY. We typically had less than a thousand people play in a day, but suddenly that number jumped to over 61,000!

Here's a longer per-week graph:

Also, here's a graph of how many players complete each level:

Our overall completion rate is about 25%, with over half of our players dropping out in the very first level. The average play time is down to 15 minutes from 25 minutes, which I suspect means that we're getting a lot of repeat players.

WAY Fan Art

This is the first fan art that anyone has ever made for any of my games. :-D

Praise for WAY

People have been saying a lot of nice things about WAY lately, so we took some time and compiled a page full of those nice things. That was definitely a feel-good exercise. :-D

WAY wins "Best Student Game" at IGF!

Yesterday WAY won the award for "Best Student Game" at the Independent Games Festival! I'm pretty deliriously happy and oh so proud of my whole team.

The IGF is the largest and most competitive videogames festival in the world. We were selected as the top student game from 295 different entries by a distinguished panel of judges, both professional and academic. This is the first win for Carnegie Mellon University, and we're sure it won't be the last. :-)

We are all incredibly humbled and couldn't have made WAY without the support of our many friends, family, and teachers. Thank you so much!!

Source: http://igf.com/2012/03/fourteenth_annual_independent_.html

WAY nominated for "Best Student Game" and "Nuovo" at IGF

Hurrah, WAY has been nominated for both "Best Student Game" and the "Nuovo" award at the Independent Games Festival! Wish us luck!

Future Walt says: Thanks for all the luck, guys! It worked! We won!!

Source: http://igf.com/2012/01/2012_independent_games_festiva_3.html

Coco & Co Final Presentation

We just had our final presentation for team Coco & Co and our game WAY. The semester was a blast and we're incredibly proud of WAY. Here's a link to the presentation video (we're the 2nd video). Wish us luck for the IGF!

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/siliconvalley/blog/2010/12/10/final-presentations-fall-2010/

Sad note from Future Walt circa 2011: We didn't get nominated for the IGF. :-(

Happy note from Future Future Walt circa 2012: We just won the IGF!! OMG!!! Hurray!!!!! :-D

TIGJam

Future Walt is totally not retroactively posting this from the future. Also, it was written by Paulwei originally for the ETC SV blog, but Future Walt totally thinks it's worth sharing.

Team Coco & Co. was at The Independent Game Jam (TIGJam) this year.

If you’re an Indie Game nerd, you would have loved this event. The event housed around 50 indie game developers at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. Some people had experience and some people were complete newbies. It was a little intimidating going into the game jam. There are all these people that, if you know who they are, they’re indie game superheroes. The first time I saw them, I was totally geeking out. Then you get to know them and really, they’re just regular people like you and me.

Our first day, a stranger sat down across from me, shook my hand and introduced himself as Ron. It wasn’t until later that day that I realized I just shook the hand of Ron Carmel of 2DBoy, the creators of World of Goo.

Other superstars included former ETC Alums, Kyle Gabler, and Kyle Gray. Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky was also there.

Anyways, we set up shop, we got to work and it was a very productive 4 days. We were able to test our game with some fun people and everyone enjoyed our game once they figured out the mechanics.

Our advisors, Jiyoung and Carl stopped by Friday afternoon to check it out. They stayed for a bit, talked with some people, took some pictures and even got to play a pre-XBLA version of Spelunky before they left.

Aside from the great atmosphere, there were some fun events that happened throughout the jam.

First off, there was a movie being shot while we were Indie Game, the Movie is set to come out sometime next year. Our team was right next to where people were interviewing all these indie developers so you might actually get to see our screens, backs or even faces in the background of the movie.

There were a few nights where we had a single elimination tournament for all to see. The third night was a Madhouse tournament in which Paulwei got into the finals and lost pretty badly. The fourth night was a Nidhogg tournament where Chris got into the finals and lost. These small losses will bring a big win in the near future (fingers crossed).

Every night there were different talks from different developers about what’s on their minds. Scott Anderson talked about getting more people into games. Derek Yu had the same message about being all inclusive and never burning bridges. These were all very off the cuff talks that made it great to hear from all these different people about the industry that they love.

Believe me, making indie games is definitely a labor of love.

Coco & Co Half Presentation

Here's a link to our totally-awesome half-semester presentation. I think we kicked ass. Future Walt agrees. We're the third video:

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/siliconvalley/blog/2010/10/25/half-presentations-fall-2010/#more-1460

Here's what the game looked like 4 weeks ago:

And here's what the game looks like now:

Coco & Co Quarter Presentation

My project team, Coco & Co, gave our quarters presentation a few days ago. Here is a video recording of it:

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/siliconvalley/blog/2010/09/22/quarter-presentations-fall-2010/#more-1414

There are three videos on that page. We're the 2nd video.

Future Walt wishes he could embed the video, but he can't. :-(

San Francisco Bike Tour

My team this semester went on a bike tour of San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/siliconvalley/blog/2010/09/10/coco-co-s-sf-bike-tour/

Future Walt is adding some pictures because pictures make blogs prettier:

Coco & Co

My project team for this semester is called Coco & Co, which stands for Constructive Communication and Collaboration. The goal of our project is to create a two-player puzzle game in which the players must communicate with each other to solve the puzzles, but without using text or speech chat.

Future Walt is here and hypothetically wondering whether this project will amount to anything. Hmm....

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/cococo/