Team Hōkū from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo won the 2015 Imagine Cup pitch video challenge in the games category—the first challenge in the 2015 Microsoft Imagine Cup.
Team members Brian Hall, Theodore DeRego, Lucas DeRego and Casey Pearring created reForge, a casual 2D online sci-fi sandbox game where players command highly customizable ships in tactical battles. Players collect resources, trade in a player-driven economy and team up to competitively control various aspects of the game universe.
Although not official members of the Imagine Cup Team, Kristin Pederson and Kelli Yamane worked on documentation aspects of the game as part of their UH Hilo software engineering course.
Team Hoku received a $3,000 cash prize and will move on to the blueprint and user experience challenges in the 2015 Imagine Cup competition, a global student technology competition.
—From a UH Hilo news release and UH Hilo Stories website
