Student Feature: 'IGF Student Q&A: Michael Chrien (NERO)'

In the run-up to the 2006 Independent Games Festival, which is held at Game Developers Conference 2006 in San Jose from March 20-24, 2006, Gamasutra is showcasing a number of the IGF finalists in different categories. As part of a series of Gamasutra Education-exclusive articles, we profile the 2006 IGF Student Showcase winners by interviewing them about their award-winning titles, which will be playable at the IGF Pavilion at GDC later this month. Today, Gamasutra interviews Michael Chrien, lead designer of NERO, which was developed at the Digital Media Collaboratory/Innovation Creativity and Capital Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. An excerpt from the game's official website follows: "Although it resembles some RTS games, unlike most RTS games NERO consists of two distinct phases of play. In the first phase individual players deploy robots in a ’sandbox’ and train them to the desired tactical doctrine. Once a collection of robots has been trained, a second phase of play allows players to pit their robots in a battle against robots trained by some other player, to see how well their training regimens prepared their robots for battle. The training phase is the most innovative aspect of game play in NERO, and is also the most interesting from the perspective of AI research." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including more on the innovative game concept and how it got implemented (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).