IM Unity Award

11/03/2010 10:22 AM

Bradley expands into mobile the Android Game Market

By: Melissa McGuire

The success of applications for iPhone and iPad has revealed a large consumer market for a new generation of games on electronic, mobile devices. Still, most universities remain focused on programming and designing games for personal computers and the Internet. But not Bradley, where students are already being rewarded for their cutting edge concepts in gaming technology.

Bradley’s new Game Design and Computer Game Technology programs advanced to the first round of Unity’s Mobile Generation Education Giveaway.

So, what does this mean for Bradley’s Departments of Interactive Media and Computer Science and Information Systems?

According to Monica McGill, instructor for the Game Design program, as a selected school, the two departments will receive approximately $3,500 in equipment

including free licenses for one copy of Unity Pro, Unity Pro for Android, and a Nexus One phone for testing the games developed with Unity on the Android platform.

A five-student team, consisting of Alex Miner, Matt Vroman, Jes Schroeder, Adam Zimmermann, and Robert Baun, will begin working with the new equipment immediately. The group will be developing a game based off the Morton Pumpkin Festival.

Now Bradley is eligible for round two of the competition. Three finalist schools will be selected to receive approximately $60,000 in equipment including 20 licenses of Unity Pro and Unity Pro for Android and 20 Nexus One phones. The competition requires the University to propose using the equipment to teach mobile technologies in a course dedicated to game development. If Bradley is selected, the prize would mean enough software for students to use both in the game program as well as other related computer science and interactive media courses.

“Before this giveaway program, we only had one Unity Pro license and could only push our games to the iPhone marketplace,” Vroman said. “Now that we have the Android license, it opens up a whole new marketplace.”

Vroman hopes producing quality projects such as this one will draw prospective students to Bradley and increase the number of students in the new Game Design and Computer Game Technology concentrations.

The first offerings of both concentrations will begin in spring of 2011, with the first students in the program being able to graduate with the concentration as early as Spring 2012.

For more information on the concentrations, contact Dr. McGill for the Game Design concentration or Dr. Alex Uskov for the Computer Game Technology concentration.