How’s your summer going? The students are gone, Art Fair traffic isn’t in Ann Arbor yet, and it’s time for more video gaming fun. Heart Shaped Games founder Scott Brodie recently sat down with us to talk about the Michigan studio’s upcoming release: We Are the Caretakers, an afro-futurist sci-fi game that follows the journey of a group of wildlife caretakers discovering everything they thought they knew about their role protecting the environment is wrong. Check out the trailer below.
Moody Mattan of Brand XR, an augmented and virtual reality company, says he got into the business side of tech by breaking into VC to help small groups generate billion-dollar outcomes. He’s from Michigan and went to Wayne State, but after graduating into a “terrible economy” in 2009, he moved overseas to work in logistics software in Malaysia and Jordan. He came back for an MBA and ended up in Silicon Valley in a firm working on augmented reality tech. He was interested in enterprise use for the technology, such as using augmented reality for virtual training or remote assistants.
Gaudium is an Ann Arbor-based gaming studio that creates classic anime-style games. We sat down recently with founder Andrew Yang to ask what everyone has been asking us lately: how do you grow a gaming studio in a smaller market like Michigan? Gaudium’s current game, Armor Blitz, looks pretty mainstream for such a small studio. It has an anime trailer (shown above) and can be downloaded on Google Play (4.2 stars with 2800+ reviews) or you can play online on Nutaku.
Just launched this week, new Windows/PC game Golden Treasure: The Great Green is a Michigan-produced philosophical open world game that puts you in the middle of a world where dragons are on the wane and humans on the rise. The game, which will later migrate to tablets and mobile as well, was created by a new gaming studio headed by former Sega and LucasArts game developer Benjamin Ludwig.
The judging criteria for the inaugural a2tech360 Ann Arbor tech week hackathon Hack:A2 was this: Innovation and/or Ambition (slightly weighted over other categories) User Interface or Experience Overall Quality Product Viability Technical Achievement We couldn’t wait to see what the teams came up with. All went in looking pretty enthusiastic, assuring us that we could…
In a warehouse space off Jackson Road in west Ann Arbor, members of GoTech that meet at the Maker Works near Zingerman’s Bakery in south Ann Arbor are setting up a new workshop. At the center, a large rock climbing wall that has been converted to generate energy is flanked by shelves of supplies and…
Like a lot of sectors of Ann Arbor tech, gaming software development is very much under the radar for most people. University of Michigan game development lecturer Austin Yarger works and teaches in the gaming development community, even hosts local expos for University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan students after every semester to come play…
You’ve been to kids museums, hopefully as a child and again as an adult parent or volunteer. They are the coolest places. Hardly anyone would disagree. Imagine that plus exhibits that pop up customized content for your age group or level of expertise, whether you’re a kindergartener or college student. That’s now the reality coming…
Do you remember that thing on old Macs where when you dumped a file in the trash, Oscar the Grouch would pop up and wave at you? If you were a kid in the 80s, I know you do. The man who developed that hack in 1989, once featured in The Washington Post, lives in…
