Game Design, Development, and Arts News

The owl is wise, the lion is brave, and an elephant never forgets—but where do these notions come from? RIT graduate student Chelsea DeMott Wildey and her team have developed the pilot episode of ScienceLore, an educational series about the history and perception of animals as they relate to mythology and lore.

Jake Adams, a lecturer in RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media, mixes his backgrounds in fine arts and interactive media to create digital holographic comics, or holocomics. Using a specialized Lightfield holographic display from the company Looking Glass, the comic books become 3D holograms with sound, animation, and interactivity.

“Developing strengths in [worldbuilding] can help many types of professionals become better at what they do. Clearly, game designers, animators, and creative storytellers can benefit, but engineers, technologists, scientists, sociologists, and health care innovators, for example, can also because the process of envisioning and creating a world and all of its interactions can help test out ideas and inform solutions,” said Associate Professor (English) Trent Hergenrader, Ph.D., who will lead the new Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling.

Adam Kubert visited RIT for the grand opening of the Kubert Lounge and Gallery in the Cary Graphics Arts Collection within Wallace Library, and to lead a discussion about his work on the Spider-Man India series.

RIT is ranked 98th as a “National University” in the 2024 edition of U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges, jumping seven spots from last year. This list of 443 includes the nation’s best research universities that also offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master’s and doctoral programs, and emphasize faculty research or award professional practice doctorates.

A growing cohort of RIT students is enrolling in the university’s Combined Accelerated Bachelor’s/Master’s Degrees program, which provides pathways for highly focused, goal-oriented students to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in a shortened, consolidated experience.

Local game enthusiasts are invited to descend on the campus of RIT for the seventh annual ROC Game Fest, a daylong event committed to the best the games community has to offer.

The College of Art and Design welcomes new hires to its faculty roster while longtime faculty Alex Lobos assumes a role as director of the School of Design.

Nearly one in six of the more than 3,300 first-year and transfer undergraduates this year received a Performing Arts Scholarship from RIT. That brings the total number of scholars to more than 1,800 in the five years since the program began. The program encourages high school students involved in performing arts to continue their passions at RIT.

RIT once again made The Princeton Review Best Colleges list. Recognized for its value and career options for its students, the Best 389 Colleges 2024 edition, newly published this month, ranks the university in two Top 50 categories—No. 3 in the undergraduate game design programs and No. 44 in Green Colleges.

The new undergraduate students come from 48 states (all but Iowa and Wyoming); Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; Guam; U.S. Virgin Islands; and 47 countries, with the largest contingent coming from India, Canada, and China. In addition, there are 927 new graduate students.

Eva Navarro López has been named director of the School of Information in RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.