August 26, 2015 7:01 PM by Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship
We are so proud to hear that UMBC students are (once again) achieving entrepreneurial success. Check out what UMBC's Game Developer's Club is up to!!
The UMBC team that made it to the “final four” of college video game development is launching the game that took them there. HueBots earned praise at the Microsoft Imagine Cup worldwide technology competition last April in San Francisco. Now, after a vetting process that involved online voting, the game is set to be released August 26, 2015, on Steam, the biggest PC gaming platform in the world. It will also be available in Apple’s App Store, on GooglePlay, and on the HueBots’ website.
HueBots features friendly, colorful robots that players build and use to solve puzzles that revolve around the bots’ affinity for color-matched objects.
The Retriever team that developed the game includes lead Michael Leung ’16, computer science; Tad Cordle ’16, computer engineering; and Erika Schumacher ’17; and Jasmine Martin ’15, both visual arts students with interactive media concentrations. This summer Graham Dolle ’18, computer science, contributed special visual effects.
The team has developed versions of the game for PC, Mac, Android and iOS devices. The PC version of the game is priced at $4.99; the mobile version is $1.99.
To get word out, the team is tapping into YouTube’s Let’s Play channels as well as reaching out to video gaming websites and bloggers. HueBots was also featured at the Gamescape expo during Baltimore’s Artscape festival this July. Cordle expects the availability of the game on Steam will provide the biggest single boost for HueBots, and he shared his excitement that the Steam announcement came much sooner than expected.
The game is the first to come to market from UMBC’s Game Developer’s Club.