Four Carnegie Mellon students are hunkered down in a Seattle hotel room. The rest of the hotel guests turned out the lights long ago, but these guys are wide awake. Earlier in the day, they completed round one of the U.S. Microsoft Imagine Cup, a worldwide student technology competition.
To win, teams must use technology to build projects that can ultimately transform the world. For the Carnegie Mellon entrants, their hopes lie in the Xbox/Windows category: They’ve created a conservation-themed real-time strategy game, named Redux.
The game serves them well in round one: They get high scores in every category but one—the presentation (which they hadn’t rehearsed). With the final round just a sunrise away, they can’t let the presentation be their downfall again, which is why they’re still up, practicing what to say.
The team’s story began a few years earlier in Hamerschlag House, where they met and became buddies. Before long, the dorm-room walls and common areas were covered with whiteboards and scribbles. The idea of Redux came after they attended a Game Creation Society meeting and learned about the Imagine Cup competition.
Although the team members—Chris Reid (DC’12), Wilson Pei (E’13), Yueran Yuan (CS’13), and Steven Blessing (CS’12)—consider game design more a hobby than a career path, they were interested in tackling a “more serious and demanding kind of topic,” says Reid.
Redux is a game of resource management and sustainability and draws inspiration from the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. “The idea of the game is that you’re making products to sell, but every time you make a product, you make some accidental byproduct,” explains Reid. To win the game, players must research new uses for resources, reduce their resource use, recycle their products, and reclaim as much waste to reuse as possible.
It took the team one frantic weekend to bang out the prototype for Redux, and another to polish it and submit it to Microsoft under the team name “Dr. Fishbowl,” which comes from a background character in an earlier game. They had competition: 113,000 people registered for the Microsoft Imagine Cup, and only 22 teams made it to the finals.
In the final round—after they rehearsed “a billion times,” says Reid—their presentation must have matched the quality of their game, because Redux won first place in the “Game Design: Windows/Xbox” category. Microsoft donated $10,000 to the university and awarded $6,000 to the members of Dr. Fishbowl.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)
Related Links:
ECE Student Part of Wiining Imagine Cup Team
CMU Student Team Takes First Place at Microsoft's US Imagine Cup Finals
