This is George Lu and Tony Pan with a new Ludo Dojo Designer Profile! We’d like to give you a brief introduction of ourselves before going into detail.

We’re both 9th graders who first discovered game design through the 2010 Scholastic Art and Writing Contest in the video game category, in which we both won National Awards. From there, our passion of game design grew. Full details to follow!

It was nice to know that we had won, but there was still a long way to go in order to become professional game designers. The 2010 contest sharpened our skills as we prepared for the 2011 contest. We knew it would be more difficult to win this year, as there would be more competitors as well as the difficulty of competing in an older age group. There were also some new goals in our minds for the year. We wanted to try conceptual games as well as figure out how to use the limited amount of sprites to create unique games nonetheless. We played some games in Game Alley prior to the contest and thought that the majority were all similar in one way or another; we wanted to do something that hasn’t been done before. This meant digressing from the classic platform and top-down games and transitioning into new genres.

We implemented our desire for originality into our 2011 Scholastic Contest game. We also used the different colored sprites and blocks to create the idea of an environment. For example, in the game Race Around the World, each level depicts a different city in various countries. We constructed buildings and developed a theme for each “city”. The timer system was used in a new way so that it would seem like the player is in a race with the enemy, as in the final level of Party Crasher. In addition, we created games of different genres and strayed from the objective of blasting enemies and reaching the goal block. In Party Crasher, the player is a detective, using the message blocks and hints from other sprites in order to solve the mystery. We believed that being creative would have its own rewards. Although Party Crasher failed to gain recognition (possibly for its hard difficulty), Race Around the World won a Gold Key.

So what do we want to do now? We want to continue our valuable experience as interns at E-Line Media. We also want to build upon our game designing skills. We may still be in high school, but we already have our minds set on our future as game designers. Of course, we will also enter in the Scholastic contest for 2012 as well as possibly other video game design contests. We hope to attend some game design summer programs to communicate with experienced professors as well as build on more advanced skill sets. We want to learn the bare bones of game development like programming and graphic design in order to get a better grip on game design at a professional standpoint.
We encourage readers to also participate in competitions as well! Video game design is an art like no other, and to master it is truly an achievement.

You can play one of the games we made for the Scholastic 2010 Contest below:

Here are other games we mentioned in the video:

• Three Trials of Tito
• Pip’s Adventure
• Trial World No.1
• Trial World No.2
• Party Crasher
• Race Around the World