U. students develop medical apps, award-winning video game

By Elenor Heyborne, KSL.com Contributor

May 20th, 2014 @ 11:11am

SALT LAKE CITY The Princeton Review ranks the University of Utahs Entertainment Arts and Engineering program (EAE) among the top five schools in the nation for both undergraduate and graduate programs. So, it is no surprise when the program turns out winning student teams of video game design and production or that it can successfully cross in to the medical world by building innovative therapeutic apps.

The Utah Science and Technology Research initiatives (USTAR) digital media team supports the EAE program with two researchers, Craig Caldwell and Cem Yuskel, to develop and accelerate technology commercialization of digital media research and tools.

A team of 13 students from the Entertainment Arts and Engineering: Master Game Studio were winners of the annual Independent Games Festival student showcase. Along with eight other teams, they were chosen from a pool of 350 game entries across the world. The showcase winners games were playable on the Expo show floor at the recent Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco.

The U. was represented by their team Hack n Hide. The team entered their game Cyber Heist which is a two person co-op game in which the duo plays the role of two post graduate students breaking in to a futuristic department of education to eliminate records of student debt.

The idea for the game came when Hack n Hide realized that between the 13-team members (nine engineers, two producers, a designer and an artist), they had a combined total of more than $750,000 in student debt. The game was developed to play on a computer platform; however, one of the players can play on a tablet device.

Early on, we decided that we wanted to create this game not only for different game-play styles, but also for different devices and platforms as well, said Christopher Rawson, lead engineer for Hack n Hide. We developed it with tablets in mind so you can play the hacker interface on your iPad.

Cyber Heist is centered on creating trust between the two players who are different player-types; one is more strategy oriented (the hacker) and the other plays a first person stealth game. The "hacker", who has a blueprint of each level of the department of education, communicates to the stealth player where to go, the position of guards, what doors to bust through and how to avoid detection.

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U. students develop medical apps, award-winning video game