Along one wall of Bethel’s cultural center, 14-year-old Nicholas Rearden slowly boiled as he tried to survive the night.
“You have to try to keep cold, because I think the character has a fever or something and you’re trying not to overheat,” Rearden explained. Rearden himself wasn’t dying of a mysterious fever. He played a text-based horror video game at Bethel’s first-ever Game Development Expo on May 31. Around the room, computers and television screens showed games set everywhere from cave interiors to the vistas of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
“It’s really amazing to see how all this stuff is just built up, and you can meet the people that made it,” Rearden said.
Thirteen-year-old Paula Jung watched as Rearden battled the fever. She’s on the robotics team at Ayaprun Elitnaurvik, the Yup’ik immersion school. But game development is new for her.
“I don’t know much about how to build games, but I think it would be fun to learn how,” Jung said. “It’s fun to see different games and exposure, and it’s also really nice to get away from doing chores at home.”
Rearden said that he hopes to design a game someday. “I’ve been thinking up of a game for the past three years,” he said.
But he doesn’t want to give away the plot.
“Just wait till it comes out,” Rearden said with a laugh.
Milo Stickle-Frizzell made the text-based horror game Rearden played, which is called Extended Care Unit Room 19B. By day, Stickle-Frizzell is a software consultant. But outside of those work hours, he develops games under the pseudonym Ambrosio. That includes a game he developed with the State of Alaska during the pandemic called Four Stories COVID. It was also meant to engage teens through game development.
“During the time it was made, that age bracket was causing the largest amount of spikes in the state, so we were trying to hopefully counteract that with something that maybe would agree with them,” Stickle-Frizzell said.
The game was paired with a class teaching kids how to make a similar game, which Stickle-Frizzell said was done with the goal of priming students for other aspects of scientific education.
“A lot of the same design principles that you would see in science and engineering are required for stuff like this,” Stickle-Frizzell said. “I had to use a lot of the math that I learned in college for the [role-playing game] I’m working on right now. And a lot of the same software transfers over.”
Along the opposite wall of the room, 9-year-old Owen Basile examined his hands through a virtual reality headset.
“There’s a fireplace over that way,” Basile said pointing into space, “and a door and a table with cubes on it, and a big circle and two cubes.” While his hands were bare in real life, the live feed from his headset showed him wearing black and gold gloves.
Eventually, designer Jordan LaPrise said that the virtual space will be a full virtual reality spell casting game.
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“This is mostly a personal passion project, not going to be done for many, many years,” LaPrise said. He said that part of the complexity is making sure people can access the game and interact with each other using all sorts of hardware. He wants it to be what’s called an MMO game, or a massively multiplayer online game, where people interact simultaneously in an online world.
“To get an MMO game off the ground, you need lots of players, and the player base just doesn’t exist in [virtual reality] alone. So I need to allow flat screen players, mobile players, console players, so I have different types of spell casting that works better for each player,” LaPrise explained.
LaPrise is a software engineer. He said that he’s been making games “forever,” but didn’t pursue game development seriously until recently.
“There’s such an awesome community of game developers here in Alaska,” LaPrise said. “It was an easy fit.”
Event organizer Wyatt White grew up in Bethel.
“I would have loved to have something like this when I was that age,” White said, pointing to a group of kids.
White grew up playing video games, and works with computers for his day job. While game development is a hobby, he said that it’s a great way to get to understanding how the hardware and software of computers work.
“We’re not going to pretend that we’re doing this and we’re all making tons of money or whatever. Like, some people are making money, some people are not, but everyone’s doing it because they love to make games,” White said.
White said that this is the Alaska Game Development Alliance’s third official expo, and the first outside of Anchorage. Eventually, he said that the alliance hopes to have multiple expos a year.
“Right now it’s Bethel, because this is hometown,” White said. “It’s the hardest version of this I think we can do. So, like, if we can do this and have people show up, we’re pretty sure we can do anything else.”
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George Young also grew up in Bethel and works with White under their company, CakeNeq Games. He showed a game that he hopes will be a playable archive of Alaska stories.
“We want it to be something that teachers can either turn on and just hit a button to go to the next segment so that they can show their students, ‘Hey, this is some Alaskan things. This is how they go hunting. This is what we should do when we go hunting,’ or just whatever stories that we can get our hands on,” Young said.
It’s inspired by his own experience hearing Yup’ik legends growing up, but forgetting some of the details.
“And if in 100 years somebody picks this up and says, ‘What is this strange USB device?’ Plugs it into their computer, and all of a sudden they see a game with all of the, with some drumming, with uluaqs, with running from ircenrraat and things like that. And it gets them interested in the culture, and gets them interested in Alaska, and that’s just something that we want to spread as far out as we can,” Young said.
Like the other developers, Young hopes to inspire kids from rural areas to explore building games.
“We just want everybody to know that even in somewhere as remote as Bethel or in the villages, if you have access to a computer, or if you have access to be able to write it down and get it out to somebody, some way, we can make a game out of it,” Young said. “It’s not as easy as that, but it’s as easy as that.”
In Alaska, there’s also significant cybersecurity potential connected to coding, said Andre Andrews.
“Having these events and finding these people that are interested in tech and connecting the community will help us facilitate workforce development across the state,” Andrews said.
Andrews is the chairman of the Dev Alliance and the treasurer for cybersecurity nonprofit ArcticShield. He works in cybersecurity with the Alaska Air National Guard. He said that’s what got him connected with development – that, and the community.
“As you start to build for yourself, and you start to build for other people, and you find other people doing the same thing,” Andrews said. “You just naturally kind of build this community.”
The developers at the expo were mostly based in Anchorage. One in the corner, Anthony van Weel, recently graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage. He showed a game he created for his computer science degree’s final project, but is now rebuilding it to be a multiplayer game.
Using old-fashioned rectangular controllers, Michael White showed expo attendees how to play his arcade-style game.
“You are a cat who’s in their ultimate dream: being able to run around the house and just knock things off shelves,” Michael explained.
Michael said that in the computer world, there’s a split between the “entertainment side” – things like video games, and the STEM and coding side – which is commonly associated with building software and working in the business world.
“Game design really allows us to merge the science side and the art side together in a way that there’s not really an alternative to, […] especially in a place where there may not be as much entertainment, you can make your own fun,” Michael said.
“You don’t have to be going into petroleum engineering,” Michael added. “If you want to do coding, you can go and make your own artwork and share it with people.”
