Experimental Concept Art Project

Journey to Dwarven Hamam is an experimental concept art project by Can Basdogan. It was done at the end of his third term and is inspired primarily from Turkish Hamams and the Oil wrestling culture. He first conceptualized the landscape and the cave system beneath it and then focused on designing the main temple where dwarves gather for their secret bath club.

The project was done mainly in Unreal Engine 5. For modeling the temple, he used blender and textured it in quixel mixer. The characters are from https://www.yarrawah.com. The details were added in Photoshop

Sketching and Blocking:

Early WIPS:

Journey to Dwarven Hmam

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Team: Can Basdogan

Serious Games ST 2024

Stonewall – Streets of Rage is a serious arcade game set to be completed by late fall 2025, chronicling the events of the NYC 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a pivotal moment for queer and trans liberation movements – with far-reaching consequences for the marginalized communities concerned. The game concentrates on the brief minutes when a crowd collectively made the decision to risk it all and stand up to their oppressors. Focusing on four real-life participants as playable characters (Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Dick Leitsch, and Storme DeLarverie); all of whom went on to become key historical figures in a strive for queer liberation. This way, the game will offer various distinctly different perspectives on the uprising, as all four figures played important but vastly different roles in their respective movements.

Engine: Unity
Platform: Windows PC

Team:
Martin Nestle
Little Tiger (aka John Bright Golder)
Vaisko
Frannie van der Walt

with:
Moin Zaidi
Thomas Chacko

Non-Linear Adaption ST 2024

Silent Witness is a turn-based, dice-rolling, dungeon-crawling game inspired by the short story Into the Grave, where the Rashomon effect plays a pivotal role, as players navigate a world of conflicting perspectives and uncertain truths.

Engine: Unity
Platform: PC

Team:
Ahmetcan Gürel: Programmer
Reihaneh Alsheikh: Artist
Ruth Montserrat Guerrero Gaytan: Designer

Find the game here.

Experimental Games WT 2023/24

Play as Marco Polo journeying through the fabled lands to convey its sights to Emperor Kublai Khan. This short memory and strategy card game was adapted from the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino for our Non-linear Adaptation module.

Engine: Unity
Platform: PC

Team:
Pragya Mukherjee
Dikshu
Eduardo Pena
Housein Asadi

Find the game here.

Serious Games Final Project WT 2023/24

Social Runner was developed for our Serious Games module as a social experiment with a hidden twist. It serves as a metaphor for the endless and addictive social media experience, where the player is placed in an endless runner on auto-running mode. They are tasked with collecting patterns of tokens according to transient current trends before they stop trending, in order to keep accumulating attention points and rise up in influencer rankings.

Engine: Unity
Platform: Browser (HTML5)

Team:
Pragya Mukherjee
Housein Asadi
Farid Behruozi

Find the academic research paper here.
Play the game here.

Experimental Games WT 2023/24

Finding Euphemia is a feminist, narrative-driven original card game based on the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Features:
Play as someone whose desperate search for their missing sister leads them to a strang city where things aren’t what they first seem. Be a good employee of SENTIRE, a mysterious service provider, or risk losing what you treasure most. Learn about the world and your elusive clients in this not-so-subtle narrative about sex work. Test your wits in an original card game based around pattern matching with a potential to get weird. Experience a unique adaptation of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino told from a female perspective.

“And you know that in the long journey ahead of you when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Engine: Unity
Platform: Windows PC

Team:
Lilly Oosthuizen (she/them): lead 3D artist, lead sound designer, co-designer
Geraldine Schmidt (they/them): lead 2D artist, co-designer
Minh Duc Le (he/him): lead programmer, co-designer

Find the game here.

Experimental Games WT 2023/24

Exprés is a language game that puts you in the shoes of an adventurer in a strange land where everyone speaks only Spanish. By battling enemies in turn-based battles, players will be able to express basic ideas and concepts of different words in Spanish.

Platform: Android

Team:
Irtaza Wadood (Programmer)
Eduardo Peña Junco (Designer)
Ashhad Aziz (Artist)
Dikshu (Programmer)

Find the game here.

Thesis (2020)

Team: Evgeni Puzankov

Thesis project (2020)

In this game you play a robot that came to life a long time after an unknown apocalypse. You have to maintain your energy connection, build efficient production lines and explore your surroundings to reach a distant goal.

Platform: Windows PC

Team: Lukas Farby, Sebastian Stricker, Olivier Haas

Thesis project (2020)

Team: Robert Bazoiu

Adaptation (2019)

Atmospheric, minimalistic exploration of a poem. Classic 2D-puzzle-platformer that makes you read while playing. This game is an exploration of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. If you‘re stuck, reading the poem might give you the answer you‘re looking for.

You can play this game either with keyboard or controller, but using a controller is arguably more fun (Xbox, or Playstation 4 in control layout).

Team: Sebastian Stricker, Olivier Haas

Adaptation (2018)

Team: Rüdiger Brandis, Alex Boccia, Can Mert Bozkurt, Yervand Arapetyan

Playing with Videogames (2018)

Team: Rüdiger Brandis, Can Mert Bozkurt, Alex Boccia

Professionalization (2018)

Team: Alexandra Petrus, Rüdiger Brandis, Can Mert Bozkurt, Alex Boccia

Serious Games

Team: Rüdiger Brandis, Alex Boccia, Ahmed Hisham Emam