UH-Hilo Students Win Microsoft Challenge

University of Hawai’i at Hilo computer science students who are part of Team Hoku won the 2015 Pitch Video Challenge in the games category of the 2015 Microsoft Imagine Cup.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition that incorporates different challenges, ranging from games and innovation to world citizenship and coding.

As part of the first challenge in the Imagine Cup, students produced a three-minute video presentation for their project.

Judges from Microsoft selected the Team Hoku video as the best in the world competition.

“Team Hoku made the video in conjunction with their senior software engineering project,” Keith Edwards, an associate professor and chair of computer science at UH-Hilo said. Their game, entitled reForge, is “a casual 2D online scifi sandbox game where players command highly customizable ships in tactical battles. Players will collect resources, trade in a player-driven economy, and team up to competitively control various parts of the game universe.”

Members of the team include Brain Hall, Theodore DeRego, Lucas DeRego, and Casey Pearring. Other UH-Hilo students, Kristin Pederson and Kelli Yamane, worked on the documentation aspects of the game but are not part of the official Imagine Cup Team. The pair’s efforts were part of the software engineering course.

Imagine Cup judges referred to Team Hoku’s winning project as, “a clever synthesis of the sci-fi Rouguelike hit FTL with the base construction and customization of Minecraft.”

As part of winning the category, the team won $3,000 in the Game Challenege.

The team will continue to participate in the Imagine Cup, with the Blueprint and User Experience challenges to follow.

Brian Hall. UH-Hilo photo.

Casey Pearring. UH-Hilo photo.

Theodore DeRego. UH-Hilo photo.