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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 numbe...

Simon Carless, Blogger

March 9, 2006

1 Min Read
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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).

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About the Author

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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