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Thomas Branchaud was the tech lead for SPI-Glass this year and has been working to build the baseline tech to support future years of work: defining a tech stack, and creating modular UI and dialogue systems. Designing from day one for future use, rather than messy prototyping (which he inherited).

Thomas Jolicoeur is sharing his narrative work on SPI-Glass, but moreso is sharing the challenges of the creative process. Extremely open and relatable to all creators who go through the “this is crap, I am crap” experience and made it to the other side with work they can be proud of!

Mind Walker (Xingyi Liu, Chaoyi Wang, Haoming Xhang) is an RPG that balances dialogue, real-time combat, and logic puzzles with fire-fighting as a core mechanic.

The Pixel Scriptorium is a new learning lab, directed by Prof. Karen Stewart, in which students work together on a long-form dark academia visual novel. This year’s team is exploring how to launch an academic game studio that supports student learning, while also building a creative foundation.

Closing out graduate project presentations is Mohit Patel and Ryan Stebe, who created an Endless Runner toolkit for supporting procedurally generated levels. It is currently in the review stage for publishing on the Unity Asset Store!

It’s undergraduate time!! All of our graduating students who completed their Major Qualifying Projects this year will present this afternoon!

Our first group of four presentations is from IMGD's new Single Term MQP studio. Four teams, with five students per team, spent 8 weeks working full time on their projects. This was an incredible experience for the students and for the advisors, and we are super excited about the future of this.

First up is Leaves of Fate, a zany puzzle platformer. This team had a tight focus on managing an iterative design process on a short timeline. They targeted a middle school (and older) audience with a core message about positive self worth. They are sharing some great advice for future projects.

Unstrung is an alternate controller game where you create shadow puppets that form level geometry in an auto-runner platformer. Nice reflection on the technical challenges and design challenges in creating an alt.ctrl.MQP!

We’re temporarily back with SPI-Glass, which was also an MQP in the studio this year! The team is reflecting on their experience iterating on an existing design and moving into full production on the first version of the game.

This team also did an immense amount of audio work! You can check out their soundtrack here.

DigiDiva is an absurdist, comedic, girlypop game that makes social commentary on gender roles. “We wanted to make a game for women that is not a feminist game.”

Shin’Ai rewritten is a cozy gardening game, made in our Japan MQP center. Much of their presentation focuses on the iterations they made across the project.

Sofia Napierata has a very different kind of MQP this year: her project was to be a simulated “independent contractor” for audio across multiple other MQPs. Really great to hear her reflect on getting this kind of professional experience!

Crow Zubrick’s project focus is on ritual, witchcraft, antifascism, and transformative play to enact better futures. ❤️ Compassion Cards bring play into life to make the world a better place, one tiny step at a time.

Now entering session three, which focuses on technical research in games. Up first, we have a team who compared methods for improving quality of experience in streamed games. They made a little demo fishing game and experimented with different buffering and latency conditions.

Our next team did a deep dive into interface techniques used in tactics and autonomous control games, and extrapolated how to apply design lessons to real-world autonomous systems.

Our next project was sponsored by NVIDIA, in which students explored the impact of different latency mitigation techniques in human-AI gameplay.

Trey Bowen also did his MQP in Japan, and joined an existing research project on creating a “sleep tamagotchi”: a serious game to encourage healthy sleep habits. He refactored the game, set up sustainable dev pipelines, and the co-facilitated a workshop to understand user experience with it.

Last session, and it’s all large interdisciplinary production projects! First up is “Disillusion”, a narrative puzzle game dealing with themes of grief and guilt. The player repairs a space ship that they crashed, causing the death of the crew. The player is asked: whose legacy should be passed on?

9 to 5 is a social commentary game about corporate greed and unethical behaviors that lead to the creation of a billionaire class.

And, last but certainly not least, Myndspell! This is a turn-based RPG with dialog and mini-games and characters that change based on player emotional model that updates with choices. Their paper takes inspiration from old game handbooks and manuals, AND they made merch as a form of data collection!

“Stay whimsical and magical!”