Stony Brook University Computer Science

SUNY Korea, October, 2014

SUNY Korea students Darius Coelho, Ayush Kumar and Wonbo Shim attended the Game Jam Netherlands-Korea 2014 held at POSTECH in Pohang. They teamed up with three other POSTECH students to form 'SUNTECH'. Game jams typically tend to have a theme and a time limit, and the theme for this jam was 'Wellness and Sport' and the time limit was 48 hours. This year's Game Jam was unique as it had the participants create 'Applied-Games' (designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment) for the first time ever. Also various Korean companies presented their products/needs hoping that the participants would create a game that suits their needs. SUNTECH created an applied game that addressed an issue faced by the Korean company FEMTOFAB and at the same time their game tackled the common problem in Korea of people spending too much time sitting in an office chair. The issue faced by FEMTOFAB was that they have a device called HaPee that can analyze a urine sample and produce a report that is very similar to a blood report, but they needed people to drink water and visit the restroom regularly. SUNTECH's solution was an applied game combined with a notification system and included a social element as well. The notification system would ask users to drink water or go to the restroom at regular intervals of time and users would earn points for performing the activities thereby addressing the issue faced by FEMTOFAB. The users could then use these points to challenge their friends to a maze game. The maze game was kinect based and had the user perform leg and hand motions to move through a maze. Completing the maze faster than your challenger earned you bonus points and failure to attempt a challenge would make you lose points. The gesture based maze games addressed the issue of people spending too much time in a chair. The teams had to demo their game to four judges and make a 7 minute presentation as to what issues the games address and how it address those issues. After 48hr of hard work the judges rewarded SUNTECH's effort with the second place at the Game Jam and an opportunity to continue developing their mini game into a full-fledged game.