ASSIGNMENT

A woman awakens in an empty mansion, not knowing who she is or what has happened to her. Before long, a faceless demon appears, and she must flee as she pieces together her past.

This is Fury, a first-person survival video game created as a thesis project by Adrian De Propertis and Giancarlo Viatella, two graduating students in the Animation, Interactive Media and Game Design (AIMGD) major. They developed the concept, wrote the story, drew storyboards, designed and built 3D characters and sets, animated everything, added lighting and textures, and coded it all, resulting in a playable demo. Dan Shefelman, chair of the program, says the yearlong project, which took hundreds of hours, reflects the students’ passion for playing video games: “A lot of them are very serious gamers.”

The video game industry is huge, by any measure. According to Circana, a market-research firm, video games grossed more than $57 billion in 2023, almost double the $30 billion in sales from 2016 – Jonathan Vatner.