Portland Magazine
June 21, 2024
IN THE COMPUTER lab on the third floor of Shiley Hall, you might hear one of two things: the rapid clicking and clacking of University of Portland’s Esports team practicing for their next match or Chase Ohmstede ’23, Bruce Baird ’24, John Nicholson ’24, and Kamalii Silva ’23, a team of video game designers, discussing the mechanics of how many cards a player should hold in their new video game, NOMAD.
(Right to left) Bruce Baird and Chase Ohmstede work in the Shiley Hall computer lab.
NOMAD is the team’s nontraditional capstone project, and they’re doing everything they can to make it appeal to an audience beyond The Bluff.
It’s an electronic version of a roleplaying game (think Dungeons & Dragons or Skyrim) set in a fantasy-western village, complete with six-shooters, strange and scary creatures, and a Clint Eastwood-like protagonist. (The setting, with occasional tumbleweeds and gigantic red rock formations on the horizon, was inspired by the Anza-Borrego Desert in California, near Chase’s family home.) Bandits are threatening the town, and it’s up to the hero to stop them. Players take the role of a “long-dead folk hero” who was resurrected by an evil spirit. Gameplay is governed by a digital deck of cards that grants different abilities and maneuvers to win against the dangerous bandits. Opportunities for new cards and abilities to defeat opponents will appear, but only at the price of sacrificing some of the current deck. Through quests and building relationships with the townsfolk, players create a team that can take down the bandits.
NOMAD first started in “Computer Game Design,” a biannual class taught by professor Andrew Nuxoll, which covers the history and basics of video game design. Inspired by their early brainstorming sessions, the team made their pitch to build the game for their capstone. The ball is now officially rolling, and their team of advisors includes professors, a community of artists, and UP alum Devin Helmgren ’14, a systems designer at the video game studio Bungie, known for creating the Halo and Destiny game franchises.
While everyone on the team does a little bit of everything, they’ve largely split responsibilities among designers and programmers. Designers oversee creating the levels and gameplay mechanics, everything that a player would see and interact with. Programmers make that world come to life through coding. Sometimes there’s tension between vision for the game’s world designs and what can be accomplished—a real world issue that game designers and programmers navigate all the time.
And even within the designer role, Chase and Bruce bring different strengths to the process. “If this game is like building a sandcastle, I’m throwing mud at a pile and Bruce is going with a chisel and very finely cutting out the design,” Chase says.
In the fall, the team released what’s called the “alpha build,” a work-in-progress prototype that has a few of the main structural elements of the game, with two different character types and three to five options for enemy encounters. Though it’s early in the process, the core gameplay loop is quick and engaging, creating situations where players make “quickdraw” decisions. The team’s goal is to have a finished prototype by May 2024 and will likely continue this project until a full release onto digital platforms.
“The support has been huge,” Chase says. “It’s been really nice hearing from people who are not only just interested in us, but also the game.”
DANNY MCGARRY ’17 is UP’s social media content manager.
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