Calling all gamers! The annual Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) showcase returns – complete with sheepdogs, demigods and boba baristas – Saturday, May 16, 1-4 p.m., in Wayfair Commons in the new Computing and Information Science Building.

Visitors will have the opportunity to play 21 brand new PC and mobile games, talk with the Cornell students who made them and vote for their favorite. Winning teams from the intro and advanced game design courses will be announced at the end of the event. The showcase is family-friendly and open to the public. 

“We love getting input from the community,” said Walker White, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, teaching professor, Stephen H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellow and GDIAC director in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. An integral part of the students' final grades is whether or not people enjoy playing the game, White said.

For the first time, the showcase will take place in the Computing and Information Science Building – a final request from Kavita Bala, former dean of the college, before assuming the position of provost. 

Another first this year is the option to use agentic programming – AI tools for coding the game. Instead of methodically writing each line of code, programmers can give high-level instructions to AI agents, which will write and test the code.

“There's a reason why the industry is using these tools – they are extremely powerful,” White said. He cautions, however, that if things go wrong, it can be challenging to locate the problem in the code. “I think a really interesting, fun experiment for people who attend the showcase is, can you guess which ones used it and which ones did not?” 

One student team went all in with agentic programming to create Gnome More Shrooms – a genre-mixing, multiplayer mobile game where players grow seeds and use them to defend themselves. "Someone who likes farming games and someone who likes strategy games might both find something they enjoy, and they can experience that together on their phones," said Tianyi Zhang '27, a computer science major, and one of the lead programmers on the team.

White recommends that attendees also check out Hard to Herd, a player-versus-player sheep herding game. “It is a remarkably fun multiplayer game," he said. "We haven't seen a multiplayer game this fun since Family Style broke out in 2019 – the one that went on to be a commercial hit.” 

The showcase will also feature: Crush the Hero!, a stealth game where a love-struck demon princess sneaks her hero crush out of her father's dungeon; The Last Mile, a mobile game where a food courier scrambles across a post-apocalyptic wasteland to make deliveries; and Olympians, a cooperative mobile game where demigods wield divine relics to fight their way back to Mount Olympus.

Kraken Kitchen is another mobile game that will debut at the showcase. Players use the accelerometer in their phone to manipulate a tentacle – similar to a marble tilt game – to collect ingredients and make meals for customers. 

Gabby Loncke '26, a computer science major and game design minor, is the project lead on the game. “I’m really proud of it," she said. "I’m excited for it to be at the showcase.” 

Loncke is also vice president of the Development in Games Association at Cornell – which is exhibiting its own game, Duke vs the Gang – and she has an internship lined up at Blizzard Entertainment after graduation. She wants anyone interested in game design to know that Cornell has a strong and welcoming community willing to collaborate with newcomers to make games. 

“For our small community," she said, "we do carry our weight.” 

A full description of the game lineup and more information about the showcase can be found on the GDIAC website. Many games will be available for download after the event.

Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.