In February, the Chinese zodiac officially marked 2024 as the Year of the Dragon, a designation that DigiPen wholeheartedly embraced. DigiPen Dragons spent 2024 living up to the title, with students claiming loads of well-earned awards and honors, faculty notching some seriously impressive achievements, alumni making major marks on the game industry, and the entire DigiPen community coming together to create a spirited campus culture along the way. Let’s take a look back at the year in DigiPen.
Student Success
Spanning games, art, technology, and design, DigiPen students racked up awards and honors with their formidable talents in 2024. MFA in Digital Arts graduate Mingyuan Li’s wordless 3D thesis film, Nobody, earned her the “Best Animation” award at the Catalina Film Festival, while undergraduate 2D student film Tall Order won “Best Student Film” at the Kino Film Festival with its comedic take on classic film noir detective tales. DigiPen BFA in Digital Art and Animation students also earned high marks at the World of Warcraft Student Art competition in March, with Jonathan Nhim’s skeletal “Heartsbane Refugee: Worshipper of Elune” and Andrew Moon’s adorable “Heebo the Hippo” 3D characters both earning runner-up in the character art category. DigiPen BA in Game Design students continued their long-running winning streak at the 2024 GDC Student Narrative Analysis Competition, with Vasilisa Shcherbakova’s analysis of Katana Zero earning the top Platinum prize and Noah Crissey’s God of War analysis earning Gold.
The two senior BS in Computer Science in Machine Learning students behind team 360° No Slope, Leo Huang and Garret Obenchain, impressed with their AI agent at the 2024 Explainable Fuzzy Challenge. The 31 students of team Leviathan charmed judges at the 16th annual Unity Awards, earning a runner-up spot in the “Best Student Project” category for their whimsical 3D adventure, Basil and the Isles of Spice. But some might say that all DigiPen student games won big in 2024, as DigiPen’s publisher page on Steam, featuring over 100 student projects, reached 11.5 million unique downloads this year!
Campus Life
Dragons made life on campus vibrant as ever in 2024. The year kicked off with a bang in January when, in partnership with Seattle Indies, DigiPen’s campus transformed into the second largest Global Game Jam site in the United States, welcoming nearly 250 jammers to craft original games over a whirlwind 48 hours. The momentum kept up in March when students fell through the rabbit hole for the second annual DigiProm, turning Bytes Café into an Alice in Wonderland-themed fantasia. With stylish new soccer team jerseys, DigiPen’s increasingly popular Athletics Club continued to widen the playing field in its third year, becoming a rallying point for students looking to “touch grass” through volleyball matches, group hikes, gym outings, and beyond.
Students got a chance to show off their hard work at the annual DigiPen Student Game Showcase in June, a party in Plato Auditorium full of original game trailers feauring dance-battling worms, frog knights, a first-person sticky hand adventure, and much more. The DigiPen Student Union celebrated the many Dragon folk on campus who make life at DigiPen so special with the 2024 Student Life Excellence Awards, awarding Student of the Year to Li Baum. It was then time to bid farewell to the graduating Class of 2024 at Commencement, where we honored their remarkable academic achievements before sending them out into the world to make an impact on the industry. Over the summer, DigiPen’s PRISM (People Respecting Individuals and Sexual Minorities) Club marched alongside campus allies in the 50th annual Seattle Pride Parade, an occasion the school marked with special pride shirts celebrating another one of the year’s 50th anniversaries — Dungeons & Dragons.
When the Fall 2024 semester started up, students got to experience exciting new campus-based events that gathered experts from the game industry to speak on two growing subjects in the field. The first event, the Tech Art Convergence 2024, invited pros from Epic Games, SideFX (Houdini), the Visual Effects Society, and more to campus to speak on the possibilities of contemporary tech art tools that fuse the power of programming with digital art. The second, the Game Accessibility Workshop 101, brought in advocates from the disabled community and accessibility experts from Xbox, EA, Turn 10, and more to discuss the ways inclusive design can open up games to more players. Student team Royal Court’s 2024 sophomore project Knuckle Knockout embodied many of the lessons the workshop taught, incorporating design for colorblind players and dyslexic-friendly font toggles, among other options.
Faculty Accomplishments
DigiPen faculty members achieved incredible heights in 2024, and in a few cases, finally got the go ahead to reveal major projects and partnerships that were previously under wraps. After DigiPen physics instructor Anand Thirumali appeared in the credits of Disney’s animated film Wish at the end of 2023, he was finally able to reveal his exciting partnership serving as a scientific consultant for Walt Disney Animation Studios on the movie. Another major reveal came in February when DigiPen BA in Music and Sound Design program director Lawrence Schwedler was able to announce that he and 11 fellow Department of Music faculty had secretly been making the soundtrack to February’s Mario Vs. Donkey Kong Nintendo Switch remake on campus since 2022.
In July, DigiPen BS in Computer Science in Machine Learning program director Barnabas Bede was named a Top 0.5% scholar by Scholar GPS for the quality and quantity of his research publications on fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets. On the heels of her 2023 Paula Svonkin Creative Arts Award and her poetry book Fulgurite, DigiPen humanities professor Catherine Broadwall sat down to discuss her forthcoming book Water Spells, inspired by magical girl series like Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth. Campus lab manager Chris Onorati, along with a small team of fellow DigiPen graduates, released his surreal indie action platformer CHAIRS, showcased at September’s Seattle Indies Expo. He also notched an unexpected achievement in October when his iconic Gravity Falls-influenced fashion style inspired multiple DigiPen students to dress up as him for Halloween.
Alumni Excellence
The talents of DigiPen graduates shaped all corners of the game, tech, and media industry in 2024. DigiPen graduate and gameplay and accessibility producer Neha Chintala rounded out 2023 by going on stage live at the Game Awards to accept the Innovation in Accessibility award for her and Turn 10 Studio’s work on Forza Motorsport’s blind driving assists, a project she spoke about with DigiPen students in early 2024 at a guest speaker event on campus. As the dinosaur-filled survival game series ARK: Survival Evolved reached new heights with a brand new animated TV series adaptation in 2024, so too did BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation graduate Alex Williams, who in January became Studio Wildcard’s new CTO, overseeing technical development on the entire ARK game franchise.
DigiPen alumni design skills made an impact on a number of 2024 games as well. BA in Game Design graduate PJ Rivas got to see his UX design in action with the fall 2024 beta release of Dungeons & Dragons’ new digital tabletop platform, “Project Sigil.” He also saw his combat designs go live in World of Warcraft’s acclaimed The War Within expansion. Fellow design graduate George Boden got a chance to leave his mark on a new entry to a classic series in March, serving as a dedicated level designer for Contra: Operation Galuga. Meanwhile, a number of alumni-developed indie game projects made their way onto digital storefronts this year — including Nate Purkeypile’s heavy metal horror game, The Axis Unseen, and Jimmy Spencer’s JRPG, Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game.
DigiPen animators also came out in force this year. Cyan animation lead and 2009 BFA in Digital Art and Animation graduate Autumn Palfenier leant her mocap animation talents to the critically acclaimed remake of Myst’s classic sequel, Riven. Meanwhile, fellow 2021 BFA graduate AD Taeza became a new senior storyboard artist at indie animation giant Glitch Productions, working on viral smash hit YouTube shows Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus.
Here’s to all the Dragon success stories that await in 2025!