To prepare for the upcoming Fall 2024 Dogfood Studios season, the team visited GamesCom. We ended the day at our, now ritualised, Scnhnitzeleria near the Köln Messe.

Here we: Admired the 10-hour Monster Hunter Wilds queue. Collected ourselves in the Spectators Cantina behind the Star Wars Outlaws booth. And picked up a few new contacts along the way.

Next year, we’ll try for our own AR pop-it-up-yourself booth at random locations within the halls or we finally have games to show for ourselves.

At the start of the season, the GDTA group had to work on Dr. LvZ’s Strange Devices assignment. The nature of these tangible game contraptions led us to playtest outside.

Not long after, the drove of GDTB students prepared their one-week launch week Unity projects. Quite a few managed to earn the Boomer Approved(tm) seal.

The following two weeks, those same students got stuffed with core Game Design concepts which they could apply in a board game concept. To help them, guest speaker and independent game developer Martijn van Buul (Jintarm) explained to students the importance of prototyping using examples from his work on The Past Within. Afterwards, he could playtest his own bumble board game prototype with students and the team.

To close of these three exciting weeks, after the GDTA teams pitched their newly founded game studio that will work towards this season’s Dragons’ Den edition, the GDTB could show off and play their own board game interpretations of their GOAT video game choked into a completely different genre.