The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a yearly programming competition in which student teams from around the world compete in a variety of competitions. This year the program has added extra focus on turning student teams into small start up companies. The CSULA team was invited to attend the U.S. Finals of the competition in Silicon Valley as one of the top 13 teams in America. 

 

The team, Team Defenestrate, will be showing their game prototype /Admin (Slash Admin). /Admin is an internet themed real time strategy game with elements of role playing, and tower defense games. In /Admin the player is an Admin. Admins run the digital world, a digital world that is quickly becoming the new reality.  

 

As a new Admin you will create networks with the various tools we know today, Servers, Terminals, Routers, Switches, VPNs, VMs, and more. The service you choose to provide to users will help drive your growth and unlock tools to networking your networks as far as you can, to gain as much influence as your wealth will sustain.  

 

A core feature of /Admin is carrying a persistent state across many devices. A cloud game save system will keep the player playing the same game on every device they one. Be it a phone, tablet, or desktop /Admin will have a UI reflective of the device and a single save so that the player can always play their same campaign. 

 

The team plans to grow this prototype into a three game franchise. The first will focus on a single player campaign to introduce the player to the gameplay and story. The second installment will introduce the multiplayer aspect of the game and serve as a trail for the final engine. The next game will be a MMORTS which has the possibility of being the first MMO built for a cloud server environment.