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Five students from The Cleveland Institute of Art have successfully launched an explosively colorful game called ChromaWaves on the iTunes app store. Purchase the game for your iPhone or iPod Touch and leave a review to show your support! All proceeds benefit Child’s Play charity.

The students developed the game in collaboration with a group of computer science majors from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) as a requirement of a game design course offered jointly by the two colleges last fall.

“We started out listing all the different criteria that we wanted the game to have,” said the team’s lead artist, Jim Wiser ’10. “We wanted it to be pick-up-and-play; we wanted a really wide audience, not just gamers; and we wanted short play sessions so you’d be rewarded fairly quickly.”

ChromaWaves makes use of the multi-touch features of the iPhone for color-mixing play. The player shoots at enemy balls of color which explode and leave vibrant ink stains on the screen. As the ink stains linger and overlap, the screen can take on interesting patterns and colors.

Three producers and a creative director from videogame producer Electronic Arts (EA) gave ChromaWaves high marks when they participated in the final critique of the game via video conference in December. They encouraged the students to publish the game on iTunes - and after several rounds of refinement, the game was approved by Apple and released to the public on July 27, 2010.

The group of CIA and CWRU students, called the iGameTeam, includes 13 artists, programmers, and sound designers. Cleveland-based mobile app development firm iNomadics and its founder, Charles Stack, donated resources and mentorship that helped the team successfully develop and publish the game on the iPhone platform.

“Games are made by dozens and dozens of people and no one has the ability to do all of those roles,” said Wiser. “It’s always a team effort. We’re all good friends and helping each other, even as we’re pushing each other.”

The CIA student artists are Matthew Barton ’10, Andrew Kuhar ’10, Jim Wiser ’10, Anne Meier (CWRU), Kurt Tacastacas ’11, and Cory Hughart ’10. The CWRU programmers are Chris Jennewein, Felix Yuan, John Stetz, Poomipat Phusayangku, Matthew Briggs, and Devon Jones. Sound designers are Andrew Kuhar ’10 and Jesse Lee (CWRU).

All proceeds from the sale of the game will benefit Child’s Play, an organization that furnishes children’s hospitals (including the Cleveland Clinic and Akron Children’s Hospital) with video games, DVDs, and other toys on their wish lists.

The game design project is an annual event at the two neighboring colleges. Read more about CIA’s game design major.