Taylor and Osborn, both Shawnee State University computer science students, explored the fast-paced universe of Cosmo's Quickstop, where players act as the new owner of an intergalactic gas station.
Their thumbs glided over the controllers' joysticks, racing through the gas station to provide customers with amenities including hot coffee showers, diamond deluxe spaceship washes and sparkling-clean glorp rooms.
Cosmo's Quickstop, which was officially released in August, has received dozens of positive reviews on the online game platform Steam. But this isn't the first time Kaelin has showcased the game at Shawnee State's annual gaming conference.
Kaelin, a Columbus resident and technical artist for Chicago-based Big Sir Games, is a 2016 graduate of Shawnee State's game & simulation arts program. Big Sir Games hired him right after college, and Kaelin brought an early demo of the interstellar game to the conference in 2017.
Now, to see a video game he's been developing for nearly five years be showcased at his alma mater, it's all come full circle, Kaelin said.
"It's super cool to be back here," said Kaelin, 33. "This is a really cool event, it's intimate and I know all the faculty. It's a little surreal."
Full-circle moments like Kaelin's aren't uncommon at the Shawnee Game Conference, and it's one of the things that the event's coordinators say make it so special.
For 20 years, Shawnee State has played host to the Shawnee Game Conference — a two-day event that draws game developers, students and industry leaders from across the nation to southern Ohio.
The event features speakers from across the gaming industry, workshops on game development, video game showcases, a career fair and e-sports tournaments throughout the weekend.
It may come as a surprise to some that Shawnee State, the state's southern-most public college situated along the Ohio River, is home to one of the nation's best college video game design programs. Travis Lynn just laughs. He's heard it before.
Lynn — Shawnee Game Conference director, senior instructor at Shawnee State and head coach of the school's e-sports' team — is also an alum of the game design program.
Shawnee State offer two separate, but coordinated, gaming majors: game programming and game arts. One focuses more on the arts and conceptual development, the other on coding and programming. Together, they create a well-rounded program that Lynn said make Shawnee State a leader of the gaming industry.
When Lynn was a student, the Shawnee Game Conference was more of a fun-focused event where students showed off what they were working on and played new games together.
But as the director and a faculty member, it's not all fun and games ... well, sort of. Lynn said the conference centers on uplifting students' achievements, giving them a breadth of industry experiences and connecting them with professionals.
"This conference is a staple of our program, where we can showcase what we're all about," Lynn said. "Instead of our students going to Los Angeles, Austin (Texas) or Canada to get experience and network, we bring all of that here to them."
A full slate of speakers and workshops covers a range of topics: Women in Gaming, Connecting the Digital World with #IRL, Draw Like A Pro, and How to Improve Ethical Choices in Games.
Dustin Hansen — video game historian, author and this year's keynote speaker - shared what his journey as a game developer and creative looked like. He recalled his first encounter with video games as a 7-year-old, annihilating aliens in the 1978 classic Space Invaders in the student union of the college where his parents worked.
As a child with severe dyslexia, Hansen said video games gave him the way he needed to tell stories without having to read or write. Programming code was a language Hansen understood, and drawing cartoon characters was his creative outlet.
Storytelling, Hansen said, is at the core of the gaming community.
"We have the opportunity to have storytelling be more impactful as technology continues to evolve," he said.
Video games as we know and love them have been around for only a few decades, but Hansen said the industry has done incredible things with storytelling in such a short period of time. Those opportunities, he said, will only continue to grow as technology changes.
"The technology replaces itself, but the thing that won't change is story," Hansen said. "It's biological."
Nicholas Ludowese was testing out the virtual-reality game Half-Life Alyx on the expo floor Friday morning. Ludowese, who graduated from Shawnee State in May 2020, now helps coach the university's JV e-sports team.
His class' senior project, Polterheist, was being showcased on the other side of the room. Across campus, at the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts, this year's game design senior class showed off the game they've been working on called BLAST.
Lynn said Shawnee State has become a feeder school into the video game industry. The university has alumni at 42 different game design studios, including Boeing, Epic and Army Game Studios.
But the program and the conference, Lynn said, are really just getting started.
Shawnee State's game design program is nearly as old as the conference itself, and the world has changed a lot in the last two decades. From the ways we interact with technology to how we consume content, this industry is constantly evolving.
Lynn said Shawnee State's game design program and its conference are still relatively young. But just as Hansen predicted storytelling will grow with new technology, Lynn said so will Shawnee State's presence in the industry.
©2021 www.dispatch.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
