MKT4 Project - Computer Games - 2008

The Games Project in its current form results from a long cherished joint effort between Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) and Utrecht School of the Arts - Art, Media & Technology (HKU). In essence, these two schools combined their sophomore Spring courses on Game Design and Development, having their respective students form mixed teams in order to achieve what none of them could do alone: work together throughout the whole semester as a small 'game development company' to design, implement and fine tune their own full-playable computer game. The results are more impressive than ever!

This magic combination of left-brain (TUDelft) and right-brain (HKU) within each interdisciplinary team has proved to be amazingly powerful and effective in acquiring the intended technical, artistic or soft skills.

This site gives you information about the games developed in 2008 by the 9 interdisciplinary groups during the Games Project. Feel free to browse through their individual pages and, of course, to try each of them, or watch their gameplay trailers!

All games developed in this project make use of the Cannibal Engine, developed by Cannibal Game Studios. One of the features of this XNA-based engine is that the same game can be run both on the PC and on the Xbox-360. This year the project was again supported by Microsoft, by providing our Lab with a number of Xbox-360 consoles. In addition, three of these groups made a public presentation of their games, during the Microsoft DevDays 2008, in Amsterdam.

As usual, an independent jury has been asked to evaluate all games, in order to confer the traditional Game of the Year Awards. For the first time, everyone attending the final presentations has been allowed to elect the game of their choice for the new Public's Prize. In addition, also for the first time, the teaching staff established the First Penguin Award as a celebration of glorious failure, to be assigned "to the team that took the biggest gamble in trying new ideas or new technologies, while failing to achieve their stated goals" (Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, p.149). And the winners are...:

To be able to play the games, make sure you install Microsoft .Net 2.0 Framework, Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 2.0 Refresh, DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer and Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (Runtime Libraries x86). Also make sure you have a video card that supports shader model 2.0 and that you have the latest video card drivers installed. To play some of the gameplay trailers you might need to install the Quicktime Player if you have not done this before.