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.
Daedalus, a desktop survival strategy game where players navigate a labyrinth and set traps for creatures sent by angry Greek gods, took home the Audience Choice Award in the desktop category.
Mikael Andreasyan ’28 was a programmer and sound designer for the game, and is potentially interested in pursuing a career in game design. He said the GDIAC program is a major reason he chose to study computer science at Cornell.
“Every single person on my team was someone who really wanted to make the best version of the game,” he said. “Everyone loved these games so much that I think it's one of the reasons that we just ended up with, I think, one of the best games.”
His team plans to polish the game and release it on Steam, a digital storefront for games.
Among the mobile entries, Sweet Sweet Betrayal took home the Judge’s Choice Award. In this multiplayer platformer game, sugar gliders sail through the forest, looking for treasure and sabotaging each other along the way.
“We wanted to create a cute and chaotic game where you get competitive with your friends,”said Alanna Cooney ’26, an information science and Asian studies major who served as design lead for her team.
