#icsquared

Embryonic has officially been submitted to both the 2012 Global and United States Imagine Cup competitions! Now that we're getting back into the game dev groove, expect updates to start hitting the blog again! Once again, we would like to thank you all for your continued support of Embryonic! You are all incredibly awesome!

We've had so many AMAZING supporters and we just wanted to give a few shout-outs to those who those who really helped/inspired us during our Imagine Cup journey:

Doug Turnbull

Andrew Parsons

David Schwartz

Kim Gregson

Jessica Anderson and the rest of the awesome Imagine Cup staff!

Dean Gayeski of Ithaca College's Park School

All the awesome IC professors who rooted for us, esp from the Park School & Comp. Sci. dept.!

Our families and friends!

Everyone who voted for us in the People's Choice Awards!

Hey! We were mentioned in more articles so here's an updated list of us in the media!

—-Team ICsquared in the media!—-

The White House - Office of Science and Technology Policy: Inventing the Future With Student Innovations 

New York 1 News (video): Technology Competition Encourages Young Minds To Think Big

Huffington Post College: Imagine Cup Dispatch: American Gamesters

MIS Laboratory: Imagine Cup 2011 World Finals: US Competitors Make Strong Start, Advance to Second Round

PC INpact (french article): Imagine Cup 2011: et du côté des jeux vidéo?

Microsoft Tech Student Blog: The Countdown: Four U.S.A. Teams Judged Today at the MIcrosoft Worldwide Imagine Cup Finals

Microsoft News Center: Microsoft Helps Imagine Cup Competitors Turn Golden Ideas into Golden Opportunities

Brooklyn Daily Eagle: East Flatbush Man Competes In MS Global Tech Finals

Ithaca College Top Story News: Video Game Design Team From Ithaca College Advances to Microsoft’s Global Technology Worldwide Finals

Spotlight at Loose Nuts n’ Bolts: Imagine Cup Team Spotlight: ICsquared

The Ithaca Times: Ithaca College students competing in worldwide game design finals

The Ithacan: Game designers to battle in virtual world face-off

Ithaca College Computer Science news: Game design students meet President of Microsoft North America, Pitch Game Idea

Blog of Andrew Parsons of Microsoft: Imagine Cup 2011 Game Design Competitor Showcase Part 5

Clubs and Organizations of Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School: Game Developers Club

In a way, it was a good thing we didn't make it to the final round. Instead of working overtime for final presentations, we got to go out and have a blast with all the other teams!

Day 3 was particularly a blast. Corey and Evan spent the morning doing community service work in Central Park. They helped build bookcases to be used in New York City public schools. The team reunited later that day to play tourist and take a bus tour through the Wall Street and Ground Zero area. While the three of us either live in or frequent the city, we actually learned a lot from the tour! It was a great experience made sweeter by all the new friends we made from all over the world. After the tour, all the teams headed out to Liberty and Ellis Island. We took lots of pictures of the Statue of Liberty and had a great time at the private barbecue on Ellis Island. We made even more friends there and Evan was able to find his ancestors on the Ellis Island walls! We retreated to the hotel at dusk but ended up hanging around the city with some of the other USA teams.

Day 4 was dedicated to the last round of presentations so we didn't have much to do then. We had friends in the last round so we attended their presentations to cheer them on. Afterwards, we grabbed some friends and ventured uptown to hit the Shake Shack and we spent the rest of the day partying and/or chilling out.

Day 5 was an important day for everyone, regardless if they made it to the final round or not. Everyone presented their projects at the public showcase in the Koch theater in Lincoln Center. Many influential people made their way through the showcase and we had a fantastic time showing off our game to the public. The showcase was not open for long and before we knew it, everyone was ushered into the theater for the awards ceremony. It was a full house booming with the sounds of teams singing and chanting for their respective countries.

The winners were announced for each category and even though we didn't make it through, we were so excited to hear the winners for the game design division. It was an amazing surprise to see Master Chief (of the Halo game series) come out to present the awards! There were so many amazing games in all three divisions. The team that took home first place for our division, Web/Silverlight, was Poland with their awesome storybook and web cam game. Philippines followed in second place and Slovakia came in third. It was an immense pleasure to compete with such awesome teams and we hope to see them at next year's Imagine Cup!

Another amazing moment during the ceremony was when they announced ALL the students would be getting a brand-spanking-new Windows 7.5 phone! We all flipped our lids, especially Ashley. She had been dying for a Windows phone to make apps for and now she will finally get one! The phone is an amazing bonus to the Kinects (an awesome gaming device) everyone also got for free!

The celebratory party that night marked the end of the week-long event, a bittersweet night of fun, contact info exchanging, and farewells. Most of us are entering next year's Imagine Cup (it's going to be in Sydney, Australia!) so we're hoping we all get to see each other there.

We honestly can't put into words how much of an amazing time we had. We learned SO much and made so many friends, it was honestly an inspirational and life-changing experience for all of us. We are beyond honored to be one of the top five web game teams in the WORLD and we hope to achieve top five and beyond next year!

The third day of Imagine Cup was beyond intense for us. So many things went wrong we couldn't help but laugh. In fact, I'm going to make a bullet list of what happened:

We couldn't get our decorations to stay up during most of the showcase. Our mentor-of-sorts Edwin saved the day by bringing us some much need thumbtacks.

We had some minor game issues and glitches.

The arrow keys stopped working so we had to use WSAD for a bit until we finally fixed it late into the showcase. The judges had already seen us by then.

Oh, yeah, OUR GAME BROKE. Actually, it was not that much of a surprise, we knew bad luck would give us a nice slap in the face at some point and there it was. Not only did it break, but it broke in front of two of the judges. It was embarrassing but they were so understanding that they gave us a chance to fix it. We managed to get it to work again and they were kind enough to come back and re-judge. By the way, did I mention those judges were Gordon Bellamy and Peter Raad? I know, right? Such an honor to have them judge and play our game!

Of course, we saved the worst news for last. Unfortunately, Team ICsquared did not make it to the final round of judging.

Even though we didn't win, we're totally okay with it. This is our first Imagine Cup and we've working on our game for less than 5 months. The teams we were against had completed games whereas ours is still in its embryonic stage, so to speak and pun intended. We also didn't do to well on our presentation, we should have been much more prepared and much less nervous. Also, we tried to be creative at the end of our presentation but it back-fired on us. Add to that what we mentioned before about the showcase and you can see things really didn't add up for us.

But that's okay! This means we get to compete next year in Australia! Many of the teams actually compete in two or three Imagine Cups before they win, so we're so excited to finish Embryonic and compete in next year's Imagine Cup. Being in the Imagine Cup has been (and still is) amazing. We're so proud we've gotten to the finals!

Ah, and even though we didn't win, we want to say this:

THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SUPPORTED EMBRYONIC!! WE LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH! Thank you for all the voting, moral support, and advice. We wouldn't be here without you! We especially want to thank the following amazing people/groups:

Andrew Parsons

Doug Turnbull

Kim Gregson

Edwin Guarin

David Schwartz

Ithaca College's Computer Science Dept.

Ithaca College's Roy H. Park School

Our Team USA friends, especially teams Note Taker, LifeLens, and Dragon! 

All the other amazing people from the Imagine Cup!

Today was a big day for us! We stayed up all night getting ready for our round 1 presentation. We had the opportunity to present to an amazing panel of judges! We were so pumped and excited to present, we basically had 45 minutes to present our game and hold a questions and answers section.

We had a few hiccups in our presentation, many of which were avoidable so at least we'll know better for next time. However, the Q&A section went amazingly, we couldn't be happier!

We were so tired after our presentation we ended up napping after eating lunch. We're now working on the updates we'll present tomorrow in the open showcase. A portion of our time there will be for us presenting a live, playable demo to the judges.

There are going to be a bunch of talks and such that we're attending tomorrow and Ashley will be attending a Women's Innovators Dinner that night because she's awesome like that.

We were so busy we didn't get a chance to blog about our time in San Francisco (it was amazing) but we are definitely going to blog about our time at the Imagine Cup finals!

We're beyond excited. We're staying in the Marriott hotel in Times Square and even though the ICsquaured team has either grown up in this city or visited often, we're still over the moon that we're here.

We're currently chillin' in the hotel room waiting for the Imagine Cup opening ceremony to start. Afterwards, we'll probably go meet some of the other teams and then work on our presentation for tomorrow.

Microsoft has given us some pretty awesome swag so far and the hotel room is super cool. We'll be uploading pics when we can.