Full Sail Stories

2015 turned out to be another fantastic year in gaming, both within the Full Sail community and beyond. From indie developers to AAA studios, several grads, students, and faculty members made creative contributions to the gaming world this year, including offerings from several well established franchises and new to market titles. As we move into the new year, we took time to look back on some of our favorite game-related stories from the past year. Check out the highlights below.

• Earlier this year, grads Erica Holcomb, Cameron Bolinger, and Joeseph Arcidiacono ran a successful Kickstarter to raise funds to support the development of their game, PeriAreion, which puts players in charge of a realistic Mars colony. The game was picked up by indie distribution site Steam.
• In March, Full Sail was ranked one of The Princeton Review's best undergraduate and graduate schools to study video game design for 2015.
• We took a look at the history of artificial intelligence in video games.
• Game Development grad Michael Hicks released his game Pillar for PS4 and XBox360.
• Roy Papp, a Course Director in Full Sail’s Game Design Master’s degree program, received a nomination for Casual Connect’s 2015 Indie Prize contest for his work on the mobile game "Divey Jones Bitey Shark." This free to play mobile game is currently available for iOS and Android.
• Three Full Sail grads launched indie development studio Dark Rift Entertainment. Nigel Nikitovich (Computer Animation), Kevin Cooper (Game Art), and Edo Von Muralt (Game Art) will launch their first PC/console game soon, and recently partnered with Lenovo on a tower defense action project called Gamestate.
• We went inside Full Sail's newly opened User Experience Lab for a in-depth look at the science behind UX.
• A slew of grads worked on projects that received recognition at The Game Awards 2015. A whopping 53 grads were credited on 21 projects, spanning a total of 15 categories.