i3 named Best Narrative Experience at Armed Forces Game Jam 2022

Huntsville, AL —The 2022 Armed Forces Game Jam was held in Orlando, FL, in September. The 48-hour Game Jam was attended by some of Integration Innovation, Inc.’s (i3) top developers from the Huntsville and Orlando offices.  Faced with many challenges, including being down two developers, the team still came out a favorite, with the judges bringing home the Best Narrative Experience Award.

The Best Narrative Experience is an accolade given to the game that has the most compelling and purposed intent behind its creation. Speaking with one of the judges after the awards were given, i3 was told that their game, Gaining Ground, was the game that held everyone’s attention with its story.

Gaining Ground’s story told about helping recruit for the Army National Guard, one city-targeted and geo-fenced video game at a time. To target a particular city, the game included a 3D-modeled portion of southern Miami, in this case, hit by a hurricane, and real-time strategy gameplay developed for gamers who can learn what it takes to care for their neighborhoods, and their communities in the aftermath. The city target could be any city, and the pipelines the teams produced as a part of the deliverable were all tailored to remake the game in short order for any city.

The key to winning the Best Narrative Experience Award was all in the structure and repeatability of making small-batch versions of locations that might see themselves as the National Guard heroes, come in, and help.