The Animation Career Review has been researching and ranking the nation's top schools for aspiring animators and game designers since 2012. UAT's Bachelor of Arts in Game Design is ranked in the top 20 game design BA programs nationally, top 10 in the Southwest and #1 in Arizona.
Watch Your Language is a new tool to monitor curse words on a gaming chat platform. This Student Innovation Project (SIP) monitors what players are saying and flags words deemed inappropriate. The intent is to warn the player to watch their language. Rocky Vargas (Game Programming) explains, “Our innovation claim is that gameplay is intensified by turning the foul language gamers use into a mechanic for punishment.”
No games use speech recognition this way as of today. Alarms go off and the display monitor will show the word once this mechanic detects the foul words. It actively monitors and provides the code for the element that’s purposed for any specific word. This technology doesn’t have to be limited to gamers. Anything that has code, this concept can be applied anywhere there is a microphone. The users have the ability to enter whatever words they wish to omit/punish. Rocky created the original code to start detecting words and made the streaming portion completely active, while Michael polished the code and hooked everything up, including the sirens and alarms.
Players use a Time Sphere to travel to previous eras in this post-modern survival horror game. Their quest is to find arcane objects for the antiquities company they work for. This Student Innovation Project (SIP) is innovative because of its use of True PVE. Regis Jerry, coined this as an “environment with a personality,” the Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability in the game gives the player a truly immersive experience.
When Holly Sheppard graduated from the University of Advancing Technology with a degree in multimedia and digital animation, she immediately started working as a 3D artist—in a lab. She used her skills in Unreal Engine to create simulations and models of restricted areas of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
For the first 15 years of Lynn DiGiacomo’s illustrious career in the gaming industry, she was the lone woman on the dev team. Then in 1995, she accepted a job at Sony Imagesoft, where she met Holliday Horton, the art director for the leading franchise title NFL GameDay. “Holliday paved the way with pipelines and processes for nearly all of the professional franchise titles that Sony produced at the time.” Working with Holliday spurred a streak of inspiration and innovation in Lynn. Now, she is surrounded by inspiring female game developers at the University of Advancing Technology, where she teaches game art and animation.
Last weekend, the Global Game Jam (GGJ) took place around the world with UAT listed as the home base for Arizona. UAT students, alumni and local game developers attended the Phoenix Global Game Jam revving out 48-hours of game development and judges said they were impressed!
