The Design and Innovation Centre (DIC) at IIT Gandhinagar invited students who were interested in gaming and developing new games to join a short-course this year. The innovative optional elective course, titled ‘Special Topics in the Design: Playing with the possibilities: gaming new worlds’, began in the mid-March and concluded by the end of April. A total of nine students opted for this course, who were divided into three teams. These teams together developed 12 games in total, 4 by each team.
As part of this course, students were taught to examine different contexts and techniques for designing games. The objective of this course was to make students familiar with the format of game development, which can be then used as prototype to build new worlds.
The course was divided into 5 parts: Modding, sandboxing, speculation, wargames and hypertext. The course explores different scenarios from which games can originate, and the outcome will be to create multiple prototypes of playable games. Additionally, it also provides an understanding of the possibilities of games as conversation starters.
While talking to VOI, Aaryan Shah, a third-year Mechanical Engineering student described his inspiration behind opting for this course. He said, “Since childhood, I use to play board games and video games and I remember being interested in making video games. Hence when I saw the course detail and joined it. I developed four games with my other subordinates. Our instructor gave us the concept and then we developed the game around that.”
Prayas Abhinav, the independent artist and instructor for the game development course, explains the idea behind this course. He said “Games are significant for mental development as when you play games you consider multiple situations in your head. This thinking process happens in most of the games which are designed that way so one of the reasons is to make the students understand this. The other factor was trying to understand that game design itself can be woven into entrepreneurship thinking. Through this course, the idea was that if teach them how to make their own game, then in the future they can go ahead and release their own title someday rather than just do some background work in a gaming company.”
Prayas also added “The market value of India’s gaming industry was around 90 billion Indian rupees in the financial year 2020. This was estimated to go up to over 143 billion rupees by 2022. The industry has been evolving at a rapid pace in the country, and analysts predict over 40 thousand new job opportunities by 2022.”
List Of Games Developed By Each Team
*Games developed by team 1 :
1. Sardar (Board game)
2. Monster feeder (Board game)
3. Godwars (Board game)
4. What if…. (Digital game)
*Games developed by team 2 :
1. Maze game made 3d (Digital game)
2. Joined together (Digital game)
3. Joined together (Digital game)
4. Friday hai (Digital game)
*Games developed by team 3 :
1. Harmony (Digital game)
2. Tetris City Builder (Digital game)
3. IITGN: Mirror and Theater (Digital game)
4. Unboxing personalities (board game)
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