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It's IMGD Presentation Day! We have a full-day student conference of creative and technical research. Graduate students present in the morning, undergraduates in the afternoon. If you're interested you can tune online, and I'll be sharing project work here too. echo360.org/section/b7d6...

First up, Abraham Goodman shares his game poem about how AI erodes critical thinking skills.

Bashar Alqassar shares his new game, “Bots That Explode (Most of the Time)”, a critique of using AI to bypass the core experience of being intrinsically motivated to work.

A comment from the audience notes that this is a game that makes us question why we even do anything at all. And, really, this feels like the core of critical AI literacy to me in so many ways. Lovely to see how making, playing, and understanding his game can prompt these kinds of questions.

Hunter Simone made two games to explore notions of unpredictability and mechanisms to preserve agency in systems design. Hazy Bones is a War-like card game with deck building. Broken Motion is a roguelike/deck-building FPS.

The previous three presentations were part of the AI Futures Lab, co-directed by myself and Prof. Yunus Telliel. Now we enter presentations from the SPI-Glass lab, directed by Prof. Ben Schneider. SPI-Glass lab is creating an AR ghost hunting game.

First up, Minyun Pan is presenting about creating seamless interaction design mechanisms for AR ghost hunting. How do you make the phone feel like the actual tool you are using as a player? Also some very cool ritual mechanics in the game!

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.

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.”