The first in a new series of
Gamasutra Education page-specific student features is a Q&A with one of this year's Independent Games Festival Student Showcase winners, Cloud Team from USC.
In it, the game's creators talk about their work on
Cloud, which centers on a child in a dream flying freely through the world, playing and painting the sky with clouds, explaining of the best and worst moments in the game's development:
"The best and worst moment occured almost simultaneously. A few weeks after the game got put on the web, we had an incredible amount of traffic and downloads from the site. It was an incredibly exciting time - we were getting so much positive feedback from players all around the world. We were able to get perspectives from players of different backgrounds and cultures, unavailable to us at school.
However, the huge rush of traffic led to overages from our server, and crashed our second, which happened to also be the department's. We got a huge bill in the mail, and of course caused major headaches for many people. We never expected it to spread so quickly! I guess the lesson is never underestimate the power of the world wide web."
You can now
read the Gamasutra student feature on the subject, including lots more information on the title's development (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).