The software developers conference Digit took place on the 22nd of April in 2022 in the Estonian National Museum. The conference featured booths from big software developers in Estonia and a number of talks on varying software development subjects. Our students had a great opportunity to demo their games in the booth of the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science. The visitors of the conference could win different prizes for participating in the activities offered in the demo booths throughout the area. In our booth, it was by playing through the students’ games. There were about 700 visitors to the event.

Four students showed three different games in Digit. These were games made during our game jams and as course projects.

Hyperglide

This platformer game was made during the Computer Game Development and Design course in 2021. It has a clean stylized visual aesthetic and smooth controls. The player has to sprint, jump, and slide on different rock surfaces to progress. There are several interesting computer graphics techniques used here. For example, to make the bent grass trail behind the player character as they move.

The Coiner-Falham Experiment

This adventure game was made during the UT Pro Game Jam 2022 and won second place in the pro league competition there. The retro and glitchy visuals complement nicely the reality-questioning theme of the game. The authors classify their game as analog horror. It is best experienced by yourself. The game starts by having the player make choices on a computer inside the game. It soon becomes apparent that these choices somehow affect also the world of the player character. It is up to the player to figure out the puzzle from there.

Dices N’ Dragons

This dice game was also made during the UT Pro Game Jam 2022, where it won first place in the pro league competition. It is a quite well-polished dice game, where two dragons face off in an epic battle. The player rolls a number of dice and then has to choose the skills to use the rolled scores in. These could be healing the sustained wounds, defending from the next attack, or focusing on damaging the opponent. The mechanics are simple to learn, but figuring out the best choice given a dice roll and situation is where the challenge of this game is.

There were many visitors to the event and our games were quite popular. Usually, there was a queue of people waiting to play any of the three games. The students learned a lot of invaluable information about their game designs by observing how actual people play their games and via constructive discussions.