Congratulations to Computer Science students Zoe Briscoe, Kirsty Beaton, Joel Daignault, Nicolas Cattanéo, and Anton Michels, who were awarded “Best User Interface” at the second annual Ubisoft Game Lab Competition. In addition, they were awarded internships at the Ubisoft Summer School, from May 3 to June 22. The competition included 8 teams from participating universities around Québec and required each team to create a 3D playable game demo, over the course of the Winter 2012 semester. The game demo had to represent the concept of a potentially larger game, convey the given theme of “corruption”, be made using the Unreal Development Kit, and have a third-person view.
The Concordia team came up with Panopticon, a point-n-click adventure game set in a high security prison. The player controls a newly admitted prisoner named Michael, who has been framed for a crime he did not commit. His main goal is to survive in the penitentiary throughout the duration of his sentence, surrounded by highly dangerous individuals. The player must interact with fellow prisoners and guards through a dialogue system, while inspecting, examining, collecting objects, and performing tasks in order to improve his reputation in the prison environment. As the game progresses, the player witnesses Michael’s inevitable corruption as he becomes less and less innocent, while doing what is necessary to survive.
The team created the game as a project for COMP 490, a computer science honours class, and was supervised by Dr. Sudhir Mudur.