EKU Top 5 at E3 College Game Competition

A group of 15 students in the Spring of 2018 joined the class Environment Design in Unreal Engine 4, a game engine freely available to the public, where they would design and build a 3D world in a semester.  In this class, the instructor, Jonathan Hale, required his students to design a world they could relate to.  By the end of the semester, this game, under the name Appalachian Mining Town, provided a unique experience as a game about traversing the abandoned mining town of Blue Heron to discover the stories and lives of those who lived there.  After receiving much praise, during exhibitions at the Vector Conference, this game was selected by EKU faculty to represent the school in the Electronic Entertainment Expo’s College Game Competition.  In this competition, over 400 schools from across the nation were invited to submit one game per school and compete to be a finalist, and be on the show floor of E3, where all the biggest names such as Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, and many others would also go to show off their newest and upcoming releases.

After a long wait, the news broke Appalachian Mining Town was picked to be one of the five College Game Competition Finalists.  EKU was able to send 7 students to Los Angeles as well as EKU Gaming Institute’s Dr. Landon. Creating enormous opportunities for these students who put in so much work, to show off their love for games, network with industry professionals, and further their career in a way that many do not get to experience.

Many of those same students decided to continue working on the game under the name, Round Table Studios. Feel free to get a freely available demo over at http://RoundTableStudios.itch.io/Mine18 and follow their progress on the game at https://www.facebook.com/mine18game/ or https://twitter.com/Mine18Game

Published on August 24, 2018