During the third week on the project, Jeff comes in with a prototype of a game he and Ryleigh have been discussing and are pretty enthusiastic about. It is similar to The Game of Life, a “cellular automaton” devised by Cambridge mathematician John Conway in 1970. Conway’s game is a collection of cells on a grid that live, die or multiply based on a few mathematical rules the user devises.

Jeff’s version also relies on a few simple mathematical rules, which allow for very complicated patterns as the game evolves. It is up to the user to determine their meaning in a social, real-world context.

Jeff talks to George Johnson about his concept, and George is fairly interested, as long as the game can effectively convey a sense of character and story development to the user.

But after Jeff shows his prototype to us, not everyone in the group is enthusiastic about a geometric art game of this sort. After much deliberation, we decide to “razor” the game out of consideration for Jeff to pursue independently, and pursue other ideas.

Clark then pitches a game idea that we all get on board for. It’s a first-person art game incorporating the Unreal Developers Kit (UDK) where the user takes on the role of a bubble in a glass of ice.

The idea is that when the user begins playing, they are not sure what they are or what they should do. As the user, you become aware that you’re attached to these other transparent spheres, and as you move about, you free yourself from them. You can choose to bump bigger spheres and become slightly bigger yourself, or bump smaller spheres and make them disappear.

You can float about this world, and either explore the beauty of the glacial ice cubes around you (which you don’t yet know are ice cubes) or follow the other spheres, which all seem to be heading in one direction. As all this is happening, the “liquid” in this world keeps decreasing.

Soon the user gets to a point where they may choose to follow the other spheres, and head up a narrow passageway. Here, they must knock out other bubbles in a seeming race up to the top.

But at the end, just when you think you’ve “finished” the game, it cuts to an animation of a fat kid drinking coke at a fast food restaurant – and the user gets the message that his life was simply leading to inevitable death, and “racing” through the tube (the rat race) simply got him to that conclusion faster. We wanted to convey the idea of just enjoying life, no matter how quickly the liquid around you is disappearing.

The whole idea is to build this simple art game ironically using one of the best gaming engines at our disposal.

Convinced we have a strong idea, we sit down with George as a group and pitch it to him. George really likes the idea and recommends a few strong changes, and so we spend the rest of the week coming up with art assets and rules for such a game, while our programmers Anshul and Jeff begin looking closer at Unreal and what it can offer us.

At this point, we decide we want to call this game “Burst” – an allusion to both the bubble inevitably bursting, and to it bursting through life.

We all spend the weekend playing and closely looking at the game Whizzle, also created with the UDK. That title seems to have elements of the game we’d like to create, although ours, of course, won’t be as detailed.