UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY – A team of Utah Valley University students have developed a game for the new OUYA game console, and their game went live this week.
The group of five students developed “DubWars,” which is a twin-stick shooting game based on the dub step music genre.
Art director Sam Sawyer said an internet fundraising project got the ball rolling.
He said: “We do a lot of video games at UVU, and we saw that the OUYA game console was actually doing a Kickstarter, which is a crowd funding website, and they had a lot of support, and we said, ‘You know what? We want to get in on that. We want to be a part of it’ And we did take some of the course work and wrap it up into the programs.”
Joe Albrethsen said the game console uses technology similar to what powers games in smart phones, but this plugs into the TV.
“What's nice about this is it's HD and hooks right up to the TV, so it's basically like a mobile phone but you're able to get a lot more out of it," he said.
Sawyer said their goals were simplicity and fun.
“We were sitting around, and we came up with a lot of really cool ideas to make these video games in time for the release,” he said. “And we said, ‘We gotta make something simple. We gotta make something cool, something fun that's going to gather a lot of attention.’”
Sawyer said the game is different in that the beat of the music, rather than the whims of the player, determine when shots are fired.
The students said they hope to capitalize on their success with DubWars and create a few more games before they finish their time at UVU.
