Sacred Heart team working on educational video games

FAIRFIELD — A team of game designers is looking to overcome a challenge posed by the limited computing ability of laptops given to secondary school students.

Robert McCloud, the director of the Game Design and Development program at Sacred Heart University, said he is leading a team of students and alumni from SHU and Becker College creating education video games that can run on a Chromebook.

“Most of the games (people) are playing just won’t work on a Chromebook because it’s web-based,” McCloud said. Chromebooks are the most common computer given to middle and high school students.

McCloud said the group is currently designing two educational video games. The first involves learning about chemistry while going through adventures and avoiding dinosaurs. The second guides a player flying a spaceship named the Cosmic Egg through the human body on a quest to find and understand stardust.

McCloud said the program is run through an East Hartford startup called The Beamer LLC, a business founded by physicist Peter Solomon. The students involved are being paid a wage equal to what they could expect at an independent video game development company, McCloud said.

“He had raised over a million dollars through a National Science Foundation Grant, private investors and, more recently, Paycheck Protection Program funding to keep our workers employed,” he said.

According to McCloud, seven Sacred Heart students or alumni and four students from Becker College are working on the project. Using Discord, a communication platform geared toward gamers, the team meets weekly to work on code and discuss ideas.

Since it is still in the early stages of development, McCloud said, the team puts the game on Itch, an indie game platform, every week to let a limited number of people test it out.

“The chemical composition game we want to have ready for (wider) testing on July 15,” he said. “We’re kind of crunching on that. We want to have the other game done by the end of the summer, so they’ll have published games on CVs.”

Stephen Clarke, who received an undergraduate computer science degree from Sacred Heart this year, said he has been working for Beamer for three years. He describes himself as a technical artist, a bridge between the “full-blown” artists on the team and the game’s programmers.

“I make sure that all of the art assets that we bring into the game are ready and designed so that they won’t impact performance,” Clarke said. “There’s a lot that goes into optimization of images and 3D models.”

Clarke said trying to make sure the games will run on Chromebooks means ensuring they will run “basically on anything.” He said that means putting a lot of time into compressing file sizes so they will load on the laptops without any problems with frame rate or download speed.

So far, Clarke said, download speed has been the main roadblock. According to Clarke, the reason download speed is a concern is not because the schools are using Chromebooks, but because the average school has a slow internet download speed.

“We’re trying to trying to limit the amount of textures we’re using,” Clarke said, explaining one cutback was limiting the variation in trees in the game, just using the same tree over and over again.

“We’re going to have to use something like one or two music tracks for the entire game, just so we can keep that download speed to a minimum,” he said.

Clarke said he enjoys being a creator, and finds it fulfilling to create games where people can have fun and learn in the process. He said finding the intersection of those two attributes has been an entertaining challenge.

Eric Boehringer, a rising senior at Sacred Heart majoring in computer science, said McCloud asked him to join the team after this past semester because McCloud said he thought Boehringer was a descriptive writer.

“We have a very programmer-heavy team, so I have been more focused on level design and story creation,” Boehringer said, adding that the stories for the games are based off of a book written by Solomon.

As he tries to acclimate himself with the team, their process and the software they use, Boehringer said, not being able to meet with them in person has been a challenge.

“It can be hard to be really definitive on anything, going forward, when everyone might have different ideas,” he said. “Some of my stuff might get changed around a bit, but I’m okay with it generally.”

Stephen Clarke / Contributed photo