August 2007: An interview with Prof. Phelps, the coordinator of the Game Design and Development programs at RIT, is included in the new book Creating Casual Games for Profit and Fun by Allen Partridge, professor and director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and owner of Insight Interactive Games. (Thomson Learning, Game Development Series, Charles River Media, pp. 282 - 288, ISBN-13: 978-1-58450-519-8)

Our Game Design and Development undergraduate and graduate programs received a Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Innovation Award for 2007. This award provides matching funds for increased curriculum development, complimentary XNA Creator accounts for our faculty and students, and collaborative opportunities directly with the Microsoft XNA development team. The award was on e of six granted globally. As a result, our students will have hands-on access to state-of-the-art Xbox equipment and software.

Click here to read an article in Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com) about Microsoft Academic Days with Professors Jessica Bayliss and Joe Geigel (games faculty, Computer Science).

Click here to see a Podcast featuring Professor Andrew Phelps (the director of the games programs at RIT) and Peter Kuhn (3rd year Software Engineering student) about the newly launched games programs at RIT.

Click here for an article in Game Career Guide highlighting our MS in Game Design and Development.

Click here to see news about the 2006 Microsoft Research Gaming in Computer Science award granted to Professors Andrew Phelps (the director of the games programs at RIT) and Jessica Bayliss (games faculty, Computer Science).

For information about Microsoft’s Microsoft Research External Research & Programs (ER&P) RPF for Gaming in Computer Science, click here.

For information about the RIT M.U.P.P.E.T.S. project at RIT, click here.

For information about our involvement with this project since 2004, enter the following in your browser: here to retrieve a document from http://research.microsoft.com with Professor Jessica Bayliss (games faculty, Computer Science).

Microsoft partners with RIT on XNA Curriculum: The games program at RIT joins a select set of other universities in adding XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 game development into their curricula starting in fall 2006.

RIT is ranked among the top ten (10) US colleges for gaming by the Global Gaming League (http://ww2.ggl.com/). Check out the article here

March 24, 2008: Prof. Jessica Bayliss’ article on “Game AI” has been published in Game AI Wisdom 4 from Charles River Media (http://www.aiwisdom.com/) and the book is available. You can get a copy on Amazon or your favorite reseller of choice! March 24, 2008: Prof. Jay Jackson will present the paper “Massively Multi-Player Piano” at ATMI’s 2008 conference in Atlanta, September 25-28, 2008 (http://atmionline.org/)

December 4, 2007: Prof. Erik Vick has signed a contract with Cengage Learning, Inc. (Charles River Media / Thompson Course PTR) for a new technical volume tentatively titled “Emotion Notions: Modeling Personality in Game Character AI” and is planned for November 2008 publication. The book will include an introduction to: video game characters, video game AI, key topics from “academic AI” and their uses in the game industry, game theory. It will also present the concepts of intentionality; interactivity, engagement and immersion (and their relation to one another – using Prof. Vick’s interaction hierarchy); a hierarchy of video game characters (zombies, puppets, robots and believable characters) and the link to model fidelity, animation fidelity, cognitive fidelity and emotional fidelity; lexical and creative communication for synthetic characters; and my research into “synthetic personalities” – modeling personality and personality dynamics.

December 2, 2007: The December issue of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine (http://www.gamesforwindows.com/ ) features a write-up on the Rocktropolis game designed and created by Chris Cascioli, Chris Baker, and Ada Tse, who are graduate students in the Masters in Game Design & Development program, as well as Software Engineering student Peter Kuhn, who is pursuing a concentration in Game Programming from the IT Department. Rocktropolis is built on top of XNA technology and was unveiled at the Game Developer's Conference of 2007.

August 13, 2007: The RIT game programs are featured by name and example in the keynote address for Microsoft’s GAMEFest 2007 (http://www.xnagamefest.com/). Christopher Satchell, General Manager for the Game Development Group at Microsoft, gave a demo of the “Aliens” game produced by some of our students (Chris Cascioli, Chris Baker, Peter Kuhn, Ada Tse, Ed Huyer, Colin Doody, and Heewa Beecham ).