M.A.G.I.C. Students Create School’s First-Ever Video Game

The M.A.G.I.C. club has game, literally.

A cohort of 24 students created the school’s first-ever video game while taking a game development and design class at M.A.G.I.C.

Void, an Agatha Christie-style procedural murder mystery, was launched on May 2. It features a dead crew member on an interactive spaceship. To survive, the player needs to solve the murder mystery and keep five lost crew members safe.

The video game was created throughout two semesters in partnership with Alienware, a computer company known for its high-performance computers geared toward the gaming community, and Telltale Games, a video game developer and publisher known for their hit video games The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.

“Throughout each phase, I, along with the rest of the team were independent of our professors and advisors so that when we [finished] the game, we [could] truly call it our own creation,” said 25-year-old Josh Field, who graduated from M.A.G.I.C. in May and created the idea for the video game and directed the project. 

Students at M.A.G.I.C. worked on every facet of the video game, from programming  to writing dialogue. Although staff members from M.A.G.I.C., Telltale Games and Alienware were available to guide them, students were mostly left on their own to replicate conditions they could face if they were working on a project for a developer.

“Throughout the process, all the hiccups and challenges we never considered that they don’t teach you in the textbook, made this project very rewarding for us,” Field said. “We didn’t have anyone to hold our hand so we had to face each challenge head-on, only asking for help in emergencies.”

Void is free and available for download for Windows and Android users at the Alienware website: https://na.alienwarearena.com/experiences/void-magic-at-mdc

Next on deck for M.A.G.I.C. students is another video game and the program’s first virtual simulation. Pre-production and production will begin in the spring.

“We are going to do our first augmented reality simulation video game featuring the Berlin Wall across the street [Wolfson Campus has a small section of the Berlin Wall on campus],” said Mauricio Ferrazza, department chairperson for M.A.G.I.C. “The idea is that with your phone you are going to be able to put it in front of the Berlin Wall and you are going to see Berlin around it.”