Students Design Video Adventure

Posted on July 25, 2011

The average teenager plays 14 hours of video games a week. But few of us have the ability to design video games, much less win a prize for one.

Two Mesa Verde Middle School eighth graders, Liam Dulany and Robert Groome, entered a contest recently to design an adventure for a video game called Spore: Galactic Adventures– and won the competition.

Their adventure, “Island of Illusions,” revolved around the quest of a Star-ship captain to find his way off of a hostile planet. The game is highly detailed and has a multitude of side text, which in turn, takes time to navigate through and find all the images.

The boys received an all-expense-paid trip to the headquarters of Electronic Arts (EA) — creator of Spore – near San Francisco, sponsored by the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation. There, they toured the facility with other winners and attended a session on game design.