MKT4 Project - Computer Games - 2009

The Games Project in its current form results from a long cherished joint effort between Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) 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 site gives you information about the games developed in 2009 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! Alternatively, you might wish to download a zipped DVD image with all-in (watch out: 1 GB!), for your own consumption and entertainment.

All games developed in this project make use of XNA. 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.

As usual, an independent jury, consisting of a group of dragons from the game industry, has been asked to evaluate all games, in order to confer the traditional Game of the Year Awards. The two winning groups made a public presentation of their games during the prestigious NLGD Festival of Games 2009, in Utrecht.
In addition, 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...:

First Prize: Group 8 - El Clino

Second Prize: Group 9 - ExpaNova

First Penguin Award: Group 2 - Project Toaster

To be able to play the games, make sure you are running Windows XP or Vista, and have installed the following software: DirectX 9.0c, Microsoft .Net 3.5 Framework, and Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.0. For some games, this redistributable might not be sufficient. To solve that, you might have to install the following software as well: Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, and Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0. 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.