Welcome to the UCLA Game Lab Summer Institute’s 2024 Student Game Art Exhibition! Our virtual gallery showcases the wonderful, quirky, surprising, inspiring, challenging, and downright fun games and game art projects completed by our students this year. You’ll find all completed student works presented in the gallery below, organized by course title: Game Design, Character Animation, World Building, and Game Programming.
The UCLA Game Lab Summer Institute introduces high school students to game-making as a form of artistic practice, teaching them the techniques and tools that will help them develop analog and digital games that reflect their own creative voice and vision. As you’ll see from the game art projects exhibited below, our students this year have learned a lot about the aesthetic and technical foundations of making games—but just as importantly, we hope they’ve discovered in themselves a life-long ability and desire to express their own, personal ideas through game-making and game art.
Congratulations to all of our students (and their parents!) for their hard work and can-do spirit. And a big thank you to Eddo Stern, founder and director of the UCLA Game Lab, to our instructors—Sam, Sagan, Hua, Wantong, John and Vinny—and to our teaching assistants—Miglė, Yongjia, Trinh, and Aidan—for their experience, expertise, and dedication. Finally, we also want to acknowledge Co-Directors David O’Grady and Tyler Stefanich for developing, implementing, and overseeing all aspects of the Summer Institute program. We hope you all enjoy the exhibition!
Game Design
Instructors: Sam Malabre, Sagan Yee Teaching Assistant: Miglė Railaite
About the course
Game Design introduced students to the fundamentals of game design, such as creating playable characters, designing conflicts and choices, and giving players compelling motivations and goals. Students create their own tabletop game with a focus on game systems, game flow, creativity, and aesthetics. Students not only produced an original game, but they also developed an understanding of game design as a creative discipline and as a mode of artistic expression.
About the instructors
Sam (they/them) is an MFA candidate in Design Media Arts at UCLA. Sam works at the UCLA Game Lab where they run and research tabletop roleplaying games. They received their BFA in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt). Sam’s recent projects have taken the form of video essays, computer games, digital publications, and tabletop games. Their work has been shown at MassArt, UCLA, DIY spaces in Boston, University of Pittsburgh, and CultureHub ReFest. Sam currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
Sagan Yee (he/they) is a graduate student in the Design | Media Arts MFA program and an event coordinator at the UCLA Game Lab. Their artistic practice includes animation, speculative fiction, digital games, playful experiences, and alternative controller collaborations. From 2016 to 2020, Sagan was Executive Director of the Hand Eye Society, a Toronto arts non-profit dedicated to supporting video games as a art form. He has exhibited work and given talks at Game Developers Conference (San Francisco), A MAZE Festival (Berlin/Johannesburg), IndieCade (Los Angeles), SXSW, Fantastic Arcade (Austin), and Vector Festival (Toronto).
Exhibition note: All completed student games are presented here as downloadable .pdfs.
Character Animation
Instructor: Hua Chai Teaching Assistant: Yongjia Tang
About the course
Character Animation provided students an introduction in how to create playable characters through modeling and animation. Students developed a character or avatar, which they brought to life through stylized visualization and movement. Students began by learning how to conceptually create compelling characters—and then translate their qualities, attributes, and motivations into visual representation and animation. The final results were animated in After Effects.
About the instructor
Hua Chai (they/he) is an MFA graduate from UCLA Media Arts. They have worked as an event programmer for the UCLA Game Lab, and have taught courses in animation, game design, and net art since 2021. They have made experimental archives about queer internet subcultures, homonationalism, and game asset preservation via game engines, webzines, video collage, and photogrammetry capture. Their works have been featured at Pride At Play (Australia), Melbourne Queer Games Festival, Indiepocalypse, Fantastic Arcade (USA), Animation Chico, and Cartoons Underground (Singapore).
Exhibition note: All completed student character animations are presented here as looped animations.
World Building
Instructor:Wantong Yao Teaching Assistant: Trinh Ha
About the course
In World Building, students developed the ability to create dynamic, interactive 3D game environments. Students used the game engine application Unity and a kit of assets to make gameworld prototyping quick and fun, while still learning how to use professional game-development software. Key lessons included using prefabs, materials, lighting, sound, motion, and level progression to create a navigable game world by the end of the course.
About the instructor
Wantong Yao (she/her/they/them) is a new media artist from Shenzhen, China. Using 3D, creative coding, and game design, her work translates computational logic into affective experiences and builds interconnected systems that expose imbalanced power dynamics. Previously Yao worked as a creative director for the media art festival Glow Shenzhen, leading the development of virtual exhibitions and online platforms. She is also the co-founder of Key Elements Studio, a non-profit art and publisher organization. She obtained a BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021.
Exhibition note: All completed student gameworld projects are presented here as “walkthrough” videos.
Game Programming
Instructors: John Brumley, Vinny Roca Teaching Assistant: Aidan Strong
About the course
In Game Programming, students learned the fundamental programming concepts and coding techniques behind making playable, interactive games. Students worked with the game engine application Unity and were introduced to coding lessons using C# scripting to create movement, animation, collisions, NPC behaviors, sound, and text. By the end of the course, students emerged with a complete, interactive 2D game reflecting their own game design ideas.
About the instructor
John Brumley (he/him) is an artist, composer, and technician who uses software to create interactive and generative things. He teaches courses at UCLA and ArtCenter on game engines, mixed reality, and simulation, and has been connected with the UCLA Game Lab since 2014. His work has been shown internationally in museums, festivals, parks, homes, cars, drawers, and screens. He received an MFA in media art from UCLA and a PhD in human informatics from University of Tsukuba, Japan.
Vinny Roca (he/him) is an artist living in Los Angeles California. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Media Art from UCLA where he is a member of the UCLA Game Lab. He has exhibited games, instructional artworks, and drawings across the US, including his most recent exhibition at the Experimental Digital Arts space at UCLA. He is currently working on a hybrid video game and book project about a procession.
Exhibition note: All completed student games are presented here as “playthrough” videos.
You’ve reached the gallery exit!
Thank you for visiting the Student Game Art Exhibition, brought to you by the UCLA Game Lab Summer Institute class of 2024!
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