The Forgotten War

Creo Ludus Entertainment, creators of The Forgotten War, is actually a student collective, albeit with extensive involvement by professional game developers. A mod for Company of Heroes, lead technical designer Jason Chin spoke on the high production values aimed for, including rendered cutscenes and elaborate scripted sequences, as well as an original score composed by a well-known game industry professional. Unfortunately, the rendered movie Jason brought with him wouldn't play video on the available laptop, so we didn't get to see for ourselves.

Fortunately, there were no other technical hiccups.

Game Data

The Forgotten War is a single player campaign for Relic's critically acclaimed Company of Heroes. Take on the role of Captain Westing, and command a small, elite and sidelined unit to lead your men on one of the most daring, successful - and illegal - operation in US military history to turn the tide of the invasion of France.

Lost in the chaos of the D-day landing, Westing and his elite force are foolishly ignored by army brass and left to die on the beaches without support or reinforcements. You must fight your way to the interior and link up with underground French resistance! Only by linking your units fast strike stealth capabilities with their on the ground intelligence will give the allies a shot at breaking through Hitler’s defensive line.

Company: Creo Ludus Entertainment
Release Date: August 15th, 2008
Platform(s): Company of Heroes, PC
Total Development Time: 11 months
Full Time Team Size: 18 Students/ 2-3 CLE Leads
Total Team Size: 28
Budget: $0, countless egos and carpalled tunnels
Fun Fact: The concept for the project, bringing together pro dev's to help a game design class release a professional quality polished narrative mod project-- was presented by Coray (IGDA NJ Chapter Coordinator) to a collection of game and tech pro's on a Hoboken rooftop over cigars and beers on a lovely spring afternoon in Hoboken last year.

Discarded Online

Malachi Griffie and Andrew Pellerano of Urbansquall Corporation were next, demoing their multiplayer online beat 'em up card game (yes, you read that right) with role-playing elements. MOBEUCGRPG. The game was both creatively and technically interesting: the concept is to equip your character with skills distinct from visual appearance, so players don't have to make tradeoffs between appearance and performance, and then fight predominantly cute characters; the technology is built with Adobe Flex and includes both skeletal animation and cut-outs, giving a 2D game the tremendous variability of texture mapping in 3D, but then rendering all the animation poses into sprites to accommodate the limited horsepower available under the Flash platform on the majority of user machines.

Urbansquall's workflow leverages the open source and free (beer) tools now available for the Flash platform - the FlashDevelop IDE, the Flex SDK - alongside the traditional tools, saving Urbansquall considerably on site licenses (only two Flash Professional site licenses for artists).

Game Data

Discarded is a multi-player online beat 'em up card-collecting game infused with role-playing elements (we're still working on the genre acronym). It runs entirely in a web browser with no download required. Players create a character and equip cards to give themselves weapons, special abilities, and a unique appearance. Then they join together in groups of up to 4 players to take on a variety of missions; all with interesting and adorable creatures to bludgeon. Throughout the game players win achievements, which award points and new cards, and allow them to advance their character and take on ever more powerful enemies... and so, the cycle of beating continues.

Company: Urbansquall Corporation
Public Beta: July 15th, 2008
Platform(s): Web browsers with Flash Player 9 or higher
Total Development Time: 9 months
Full Time Team Size: 4
Total Team Size: 4 + contractors
Budget: $90K
Fun Fact: Designing a massively-multi-player online game, with all its inherent networking code, a never-done-before skeletal animation system, thousands of unique pieces of art... and designing it all from scratch... with 4 people... is... fun.

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