Welcome to the 2021 NYU Game Center Showcase! This year, the Showcase is a two day live-stream, taking place Thursday, May 20 & Friday, May 21. 

In another rollercoaster of a year, our students from around the world poured their drive and creative spirit into the creation of a phenomenal batch of games. These projects are a feat to be celebrated, and we recognize the dedication, perseverance, and ingenuity it took for these designers to bring such amazing work to life. We’re so proud to invite you to these experiences, wherever you are, via the comforts of our live-streamed showcase!

This year’s crop of games is teeming with life and diversity. From a homey character-driven magical cafe simulator to a gritty little role-playing game set in an exploding desert… onto sizzling games with food to make your mouth water, or chaotic teamwork adventures that play across several screens, we’ll make sure you can savor every last drop. You don’t want to miss it!

And of course, do go exploring these phenomenal games for yourself. Come along and join the cheer, we’re simply thrilled to have you with us!

Send a congratulatory message to our graduates! We’re going to have yearbook-style guestbook messages appear on stream during the Showcase, and you can send us some well-wishes to our grads! Submit a message here: https://forms.gle/HJU7ZsvqLwZzcCpf8

SHOWCASE SCHEDULE

THURSDAY, MAY 20, 6:00PM – HOSTED BY FRANK LANTZ, REBEKAH SALTSMAN, & ADAM SALTSMAN

• Awakening – Haku (Minyan) Cai, Rosaita (Wo) Wu, Harry (Weizhong) Chen, Jonathan Otcasek, Stephen Gonzalez  – Awakening is a 3D third person open-world game where you will jump, roll, dash and glide across vast, mysterious landscapes and meet strange creatures. Learn these creatures’ language and explore the ruins of the old world to uncover the secrets of the ancient past.
• Mind over Manam – Team Coconut – Krishan & Viji Rajaratnam – If words could move you, where would they take you? Follow Gayatri as she remembers how to speak in this puzzle-adventure about a mother, a daughter, and a forgotten first language.
• Waiting For Evening – Varun Saxena and Alina Constantin – Waiting for Evening is a mystery room of love and relations through 40 years in Bombay (present day Mumbai). In the span of an afternoon, you unravel the intimate stories of a Zaver Mahal apartment, starting under British Raj in the 1920s all the way to post-Independence in the ‘60s.
• 2005 – Toby Do – An atmospheric first-person game about a Vietnamese family living in California.
• Sword – Hao Fan – Sword is a Wuxia action game in which the player plays as a swordsman, to fight through beautiful but lethal scenes.
• Schwarzschild – Merry Hospelhorn – Schwarzschild is a top-down, dungeon-crawling bullet-puzzler where the player methodically turns dungeons against their makers by bending gravity to their will. Use superior mobility to out-maneuver adversaries and counter attack with wells of concentrated gravity that disrupt and manipulate the environment around them.
• Handmade A.I  – Alina Constantin – Handmade A.I is an investigation box of analogue experiments to play on principles of A.I outside technology. A set of card and mind games in 3 parts, it explores foundations of A.I as a social grammar, rather than math construct, building a set of playable allegories on concepts of extraction, interpretation and automated decision-making.
• Searching For… – Mengqi Gao, Yunci Guo, Yamiao Liu, Lu Yang – Searching For… is a narrative game where a detective story writer enters a virtual world to play as her own protagonist and solve the case of a missing girl, in order to write her novel.

THURSDAY, MAY 20, 7:30PM – HOSTED BY CLARA FERNANDEZ-VARA & MARY KENNEY

• Crown Delights Deli –  Isiah Rosa, Lianna Pang, Mike Zhang, Isaac Wirth, Kyra Zimmermann – Crown Delights Deli is a visual novel that takes place in a bodega in  Brooklyn. Speak a variety of different languages and dialects. The customers will respond differently depending on what you say. Choose wisely!
• DELINQUENTS – Luke Brockmann, Annamaria Koshy – Delinquents is a grid based tactics game where players utilize “game-breaking” abilities to even the odds.
• Performing Pretend: An Actor’s Guide to Performing Dungeons and Dragons – Ren Hughes  – An Actor’s Guide to Performing in Dungeons and Dragons internet shows, written for entertainers’ first coming to the new space.
• Netalia  –  Adam Goren, Kyra Zimmerman, Brendy Marquardt, Andrew Orluk, Scott Merrick – Netalia is a 2D Metroidvania platformer set in an explorable cyberpunk city. As a smuggler, you will climb walls, infiltrate robot-guarded facilities, and traverse the city as you complete tasks set for you by your mysterious employer…
• The Nightmarket – half-cat – Anjali Chavan & Jessica Zhu  – Make riceballs for whimsical patrons in this charming 2D iOS game’s cute and bustling nightmarket!
• Unholy Ghost Eulogy – Yifan Mao  – An interactive 3D environmental art scene built in Unreal Engine, that is meant to show the unholy ghost within me. A solo original IP with Buddhism inspired mecha rendered in a realism style.

FRIDAY, MAY 21, 6:00PM – HOSTED BY CHARLES PRATT & GREG HEFFERNAN

• Rewilding – Rowan Wood, Dayoon Lee, Sammy Chuang, Parker Crandell, Spencer Bernstein, Martin Neyari  – Rewilding is a meditative planting game about growing a forest between long stretches of cryogenic hibernation. The story follows Syd and their mandated AI companion Geva as they work together to recover a devastated ecosystem and foster a new normal.
• Ghost Friends – June  – Ghost Friends is a visual novel/stealth game hybrid about meeting a new friend. Avoid nightmare enemies, find clues, and use them to obtain a new friend!
• Geist – Kevin Ray & Rilee Horowitz – Geist is a first-person Stealth Action game with a focus on movement and freerunning. You play as a “geist”, a bounty hunter that utilizes magic powers granted to them by a bacteria that makes its home inside their bone marrow.
• Blackthorn – Kate Howell, Samina Trachier, Mickey Torres, Winlyn Liu, Madison Hindsley – Genevieve Benoit magically attends Blackthorn’s Academy of the Dark Arts in Sevier, Vermont after she turns sixteen. As a new student at the Academy and new initiate into Sevier’s secret Coven, Genevieve uses her magical journal to guide her while she unlocks dark secrets about the school, the teachers, the students, and her own past.
• Be Water – Anjali Chavan, Arjun Jaishankar, Carsen Decker, Charlie Hattabaugh, Connor Allen-Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Yuan, Maddy Sutton – Play as a drop of water who longs to be with a houseplant on the other side of a vacant apartment. Utilize the physical properties of water to platform across various household obstacles, solving puzzles to reach your one true love.

FRIDAY, MAY 21, 7:00PM – HOSTED BY NAOMI CLARK, SARAH ELMALEH & A SURPRISE GUEST

• The Official Teamwork Test – Jingyi Li, Charlie Harper – Combining the immersive experience of a first-person escape room with a layered multiplayer browser game, The Official Teamwork Test introduces innovative cooperative play.  Both sides of this gameplay equation must work together to achieve the ultimate goal: complete, print and deliver “Quarterly Reports” to your manager at Big Corporation Inc.
• Rhubarb Roastery – NYU Brew Crew – Jess Erion, Sasha Scudder, Ziyad Duron, Charlie Harper  – In this cozy, character-driven mobile game, you become the owner of Rhubarb Roastery, a mysterious cafe that appears only in times of need. Learn about your customer’s troubles and offer them guidance through hand-crafted drinks magically infused with emotion.
• Short Walk to the A Train – Emi Schaufeld – Short Walk to the A Train is a conversation simulator where instead of picking what each character says, you pick who talks next. You guide the conversation of two strangers as they chat about life, love, and everything in between and witness small talk transform into genuine conversation.
• Nainai’s Recipe – Fan Fang, Mai Hou – Nainai’s Recipe is a game that captures the cooking feeling in stylized visuals. And a family story about how we lived together in a special way during 2020.
• The Intimation Game – Thomas Sullivan – The Intimation Game is a two player card game about having a conversation between a Human and a Machine. Use a chessboard and cards to guide your conversation and build rapport between two entities with different communication styles.
• Damage Dealer by Gil Lawson – Damage Dealer is a narrative simulation game about tending to sick machines in an exploding desert.
• Roadshop by Christine Fouron, Courtney Seymour, Kat, Erin Bushnell, Stephan Darteville, Max Lincoln, Inno Spellman – As a chef to a start-up enchanted food shop; players in “Roadshop” work through their feelings by taking to customers, cooking food, and contemplating their life choices. Set in the warm forests of Myros, this 3D Visual Novel explores a relationship that has progressed past a one-sided adulation into the beginnings of a budding romance.
• Sokoban: Alchemist – Williams Xue, Steven Chen, Julia Wang, William Jiang – Sokoban: Alchemist is an action-adventure game with Sokoban as the main mechanism, it’s very different from a traditional Sokoban game, the protagonist is a cat-like alchemist who has the ability to dash and flip over the blockage to will create a consistent action gameplay.

The NYU Game Center Showcase is produced by a dedicated group of NYU Game Center students including Charlie Harper, Alina Constantin, Mai Hou, Fan Fang, Christine Fouron, Jenny Bourke, Dayoon Lee, June Elazgui, and Isiah Rosa.

Poster Art by Rebekka Dunlap. Find more of her work here. 

Music featured on the stream: “Just doin it” by Cosmo D, “Be Water Samba” by Charlie Hattabaugh, “Teamwork Test March” by Noah Balamucki, “My Green Age” by Heavy Meadow Ensemble – Spencer Bernstein, Micah Prussack, Henry Plotnick, Violet W, Niko Hasapopoulos, and “Glassy Dreams” by Krishan Rajaratnam (of Team Coconut).

The NYU Game Center Showcase is open to the public, free, and happening live at twitch.tv/nyugamecenter. There will be no in-person component of the Showcase this year. 

The NYU Game Center would like to thank our event sponsors: Fresh Planet, Take-Two Interactive, Empire State Development, and Parsec. Their generous support makes our events possible.

Watch here May 20 & 21!