From the 23rd to the 25th of October, we were very happy to be back at GameOn with our students. GameOn is the biggest video games expo and conference in the Baltics. At the LITEXPO conference center, there were several open-area stages, Indie Town, filled with many indie games from the region, Eduverse for educational institutions, Artist Alley, Merchant Square, GameVerse, and many other dedicated areas.

On the Indie Town stage, the three days were dedicated to topics on learning, creating, and playing video games. Lithuanian educational institutions talked about their highly multidisciplinary curricula. It is amazing to see working programs that effectively combine art, design, production, coding, and technology. It is equally amazing to see the high-quality games that students in those programs create.

Of course, AI was also a substantial topic. It is important not to just take a shallow stance on whether AI is good or bad, but rather to analyze what it changes in both education and industry. Where can AI be a useful and effective colleague, and where does it create more problems than it solves? It is important to have such discussions and investigations whenever new technologies change how we do things.

Our own booth layout in Eduverse was similar to the one we had last year. Students showcased their games, witnessed how actual gamers play their games, and grew their professional networks. We told visitors about our courses and game jams. For people more interested in our university, there were special envelopes with merch and further information. To our surprise, so many people were interested in our game jams and studying at the University of Tartu that our game jam flyers and merch envelopes ran out on Sunday.

Droidream

Defended as an excellent bachelor’s thesis last June, Droidream is a game featuring turn-based combat, resource management, and a multitude of minigames. Arthur had been improving it a lot since June and the showcased version had a really good user flow. It was interesting to see how both among young and old gamers, there were people who got the game right away.

Patternless Behavior

The third place winner from the UT Pro Game Jam of 2026, Patternless Behavior, was developed during the jam by a six-member team and showcased by Patrick. The player is to visit the different folk clothing pattern masters of Estonia and learn their patterns by dodging their patterns. Despite the title, there are a lot of patterns in the game. It is the behavior of the patterns that might initially seem patternless.

Wake her up!

On the right side of the booth, we showcased several projects. One was the second place game from the most recent UT Game Jam 2026, Wake her up!. This game, developed in a team of six and showcased by Mari Lee, is about quickly possessing household appliances as a ghost. Before the expo, Mari Lee added gamepad controls and a high score table for recording the fastest times.

DeltaVR

Having recently purchased the Steam Frame, we decided to bring to GameOn our flagship student project DeltaVR. Developed by students Toomas, Joonas, Timur and Samuel across several years, DeltaVR takes the player virtually into our Delta educational building, even from Vilnius. There the players can drive with the Bolt self-driving car from our Autonomous Driving Lab, draw pretty graphics on a whiteboard in the CGVR Study Lab, shoot UFOs from the second-floor terrace, see the Institute of Technology’s all-terrain robots, and much more.

Psyrreal

The last project we brought was Psyrreal shown by Madli. This is a project we use for researching effects of hallucinogenic visuals together with the Natural and Artificial Intelligence Lab. While it did run on the Frame, we mostly showed it using Meta Quest 3 and without mirroring the image to the big screen due to a large number of kids in the expo. Nonetheless, there were many people interested in Psyrreal and the accompanying research, which Madli and Mari Lee professionally discussed with them.

The three days were intense, but extremely rewarding for all of us. It is so cool to see gamers coming to try our student games, talk to us about game development, and learn about our uni. Of course this also works the other way. Our students visited the other booths, tried out games and applications from other educational institutions as well as indie games in Indie Town. Most essentially, all the different conference talks from industry professionals always give new insights into the video game industry, education, and professional development.

See you next time, GameOn!