Two stick figures lie on a piece of college-ruled lined paper. Lying idly, the characters are only the product of one student’s boredom. Suddenly, they spring to life. Not only are they alive, they’re fighting one another. No, this is not a dream. Due to the effort of two Syracuse University students, it will soon be a reality.

Drawing a figure on notebook paper, uploading it onto the Internet and then seeing it come to life to battle other cartoon creations will soon be typical game play with ‘Grafighters,’ a computer game designed by Eric Cleckner, a senior advertising design major, and Dave Chenell, a senior information management technology major. Uploading a digital picture to the computer starts the game.

‘You can take a picture with your phone and upload it to the site and it animates it just like you think it would,’ Chenell said.

The idea for the game came about after Cleckner and Chenell were bored sitting in class. Chenell was drawing a dinosaur in his notebook, and Cleckner said to Chenell, ‘I bet my dinosaur could beat your dinosaur.’ Chenell said no way, and from there the ideas started rolling.

‘We realize we probably aren’t the only students drawing in our notebooks instead of taking notes,’ Cleckner said. ‘I think it has the ‘wow’ factor. It’s a doodle in a notebook and then 30 seconds later it can be dancing and fighting across the screen.’

The duo have backgrounds in technology and Web creations, so they were able to design the concepts for the website themselves and said they have been excited about the ideas they’ve come up with. For instance, a character drawn on paper with a thick Sharpie will fight better than a thin character drawn with a pencil. The way the characters are actually drawn affects the way they fight. If the character has big arms, he should be able to punch. The shape and size are supposed to determine how the characters will play.

‘They are fighting based on how they are drawn, so that’s where it becomes kind of cool,’ Chenell said. ‘The more you upload characters, the more you see certain trends, like which characters will be faster and stronger.’

Though the animated drawings can fight any random character uploaded to the site, friends can play each other if they both upload characters and select to battle it out.

But Cleckner said mystery is the fun of the game. If the character is drawn very dense, he will be very defensive. If he’s light and fluffy, he will fight weak and look frail or flimsy.

‘It’s most important to distinguish that you personally don’t control your characters with a controller or button, it’s totally based on how your character was drawn from the start,’ Cleckner said. ‘When you upload your character, part of the process is telling the computer what each part of your character is.’

The computer needs to be told where the character’s arms, head and legs are, and after the dissection of the character is complete, watching the characters fight is the only step left in the game.

‘You just cross your fingers and hope the character you’ve drawn will be able to challenge the character they are playing and win,’ Cleckner said.

Cleckner and Chenell said they hope the game will take over the middle ground of the video game industry. Somewhere in between Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, iPods and mini games is where the guys hope Grafighters will stand in the gaming world.

To create buzz for the game, Cleckner said they have big plans to unleash it on campus. Cleckner and Chenell said they want Grafighters to become the World Wrestling Entertainment of hand-drawn characters. The two plan to focus on gaining publicity on the SU campus and then expanding to make the game into a business, with money-making involved in the long run.

Cleckner said many people were skeptical about how successful the site would be and if some of the ideas were even possible. But now, Cleckner and Chenell know the game is entirely possible. It’s still a work in progress, he said, but it should be done by the beginning of the fall semester.

Cleckner said they hope to have a shop online where users could exchange parts with their friends and shop for their characters. It would range from character parts to accessories to buying new moves and moving up levels. It would be free to play, but if users wanted to make upgrades they would pay for them.

Alix Browne, a junior economics major, said she probably would not play the game because she has no artistic ability, but she said the game sounds intriguing.

‘I think it would be successful for the same reason comics and video games are successful,’ Browne said. ‘‘World of Warcraft’ is really successful, so this sounds cool and I think it would gain popularity, too.’
 
Chenell said he is hoping Grafighters becomes a legitimate distraction that teachers want to outlaw it from their classrooms.

‘If no student is ever bored in class again,’ Cleckner said, ‘we have done our job.’

rltoback@syr.edu

Published on April 26, 2010 at 12:00 pm