The DigiPen Europe-Bilbao community celebrated another year’s worth of interdisciplinary game projects last month during the online Student Game Showcase event. For those who missed the live viewing, you can watch the entire showcase below at your own leisure.
As always, students from multiple disciplines collaborated over the course of the academic year to craft a diverse lineup of rich gaming experiences.
First-year programming students from the BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation program developed their projects with a custom engine for the first time. It was a new and enriching experience for them, and for sure a different one from their first semester in fall where they used Unity as the base engine for the project. These games were developed using a bare-bones C/C++ game engine, which they expanded upon with the help of their instructor to add new tools, features, and capabilities. They also developed all the art by themselves!
The second-year projects introduced a new twist, as the programming students worked for the first time with their fellow artists from the BFA in Digital Art and Animation program. They are ready to show you their combination of specialties, as demonstrated by a range of puzzlers, platformers, and action adventures. All second-year games were developed in C++ using a custom engine — featuring original 2D art, animation, and design.
Third-year programming students were involved once again building tools from the ground up, facing complex challenges as a new dimension kicked into development. For these teams, individual students explored new specializations as they worked across disciplines to deliver a 3D game based in C++, creating their own 3D art assets using industry-standard tools and pipelines.
Finally, we have our fourth-year games. These capstone projects, which were built in Unreal Engine, represent the students’ career-long accumulation of skills and game-making experience. For this year, one fourth-year project team saw artists and programmers joining forces to craft a haunting 3D adventure, whereas other teams composed purely of programmers developed their own unique takes on 3D adventure, puzzle-solving, and exploration.
Many of these games will be available soon through Steam, so make sure to add them to your Wishlist! You can also play all of the games — along with those from previous years — by downloading them from the DigiPen Game Gallery.