At 4 a.m. with an approaching deadline, four Chapman students crammed into a dorm room to put the final touches on their master creation: Project 2015.

Team Chapman University’s video game Project 2015 is one of 150 entries that made it through round one of Microsoft’s international Imagine Cup Competition. Now they have until Wednesday, May 20, to complete the final stages of their game for round two and become one of six teams that will continue on to round three in Cairo, Egypt.

“It was very hard to try to make something that deals with extreme poverty and hunger be fun,” said senior Jess Bermudes, project leader. “We wanted to engage the player to make them think about the problems faced in the developing world. Our video game is supposed to be a simulation of what it is like to be a group of U.N. workers.”

The team, consisting of Bermudes and senior William Heatley, computer science majors, senior computer information systems and business administration major Nick Nabavian, and junior digital arts major Kilo Akuna, worked together to create a video game that will help raise awareness and lead to a solution to the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which include ending world hunger, poverty and disease.

“The U.N.’s Millennium Goals are basically a set of seven different ways we, as human beings and global citizens, can help to improve the world by 2015,” said Heatley.

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup Competition, which started in 2002, had more than 200,000 students from over 100 countries competing in the 2008 competition. Students can enter different mediums such as photography, film and game design.

“Most people don’t think about it, but games are a very powerful medium for sharing a message in a way that not even a movie can show,” said Bermudes.

Project 2015 is a real-time strategy game similar in design to Starcraft with elements of Sim City, according to Bermudes.

The game puts the player in the commander position, where he or she can see and move around from overhead as if in a helicopter or viewing from a spy satellite, according to Heatley.

“Our game hopes to educate people on the role of the U.N. and the importance of building sustainable communities,” said Nabavian. “We want to communicate these ideas to the players, but do so in an enjoyable way.… It is a fun game that just so happens to also teach and educate.”

Each game level has a different location, problem and challenge the player will have to overcome. The final more difficult levels could involve helping a town recently ravaged by a hurricane, according to Heatley.

“After someone plays the game, first they should feel like, ‘This sucks! How can anyone build sustainability with such limited resources and so many problems?’” said Nabavian. “They should learn that true change is never immediate and that success is determined in the long run.”

With the help of William Wood Harter, adjunct professor and project mentor, all four students are earning upper division credit and met with Ambassador Gaddi H. Vasquez, the U.S. representative to U.N. organizations in Rome, to discuss and get help with their project.

After being accepted into the first round, the team was invited to go to Boston from Friday, May 1, through Tuesday, May 5, where it presented its game in the U.S. Finals of the Imagine Cup. All expenses were covered by Microsoft. After round two, if the team succeeds as one of six finalists, it will be flown to Cairo, Egypt for the third round in July.

“The grand prize is $25,000 for the team,” said Bermudes. “But when divided out of all the hours we spent on it, we're not in it just for the money, but also bragging rights that we developed one of the best educational games in the world.”