While some students were writing their last final exam, others were playing theirs – demoing their video games for friends, family and gamers at the Game Design Initiative at Cornell’s (GDIAC) 2025 Games Showcase, held May 17, 1-4 p.m. in the Physical Sciences building.

More than 475 people attended the event to try out the new games and vote for their favorite. The showcase was the final exam for students in Cornell’s game design courses and featured desktop games from the intro courses and mobile games from the advanced course. In each class, teams of eight to 10 students – a mix of programmers, artists, sound designers, and UX designers – developed and marketed a computer game, which is available for public download.

“The grade for these projects depends upon how fun something is, and the only way you can test that is to get people playing it,” said Walker White, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, senior lecturer and director of GDIAC in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Read the entire story and see the winning games on the Cornell Bowers website.