Welcome to the DePaul Originals Game Studio!
DePaul Originals is a game development studio that is located within DePaul University’s Loop campus. Its focus is the production of high quality game experiences that are delivered on commercial platforms.
Our goal here is to provide our game design students with the experience of working at a larger game studio on a game that has many pieces. Typically, in education spaces, students are working in singular groups one project over a quarter or semester. The projects in development at DePaul Originals are intended to be refined over a couple of years so student workers. This means that those who participate may only be brought in to focus on a single portion of the game at any given time.
We focus on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine as our main development tool, as we find the base tool set easy to compartmentalize. This allows us to encourage students to develop a specialty, while at the same time maintaining a broad skill base. Through work and internship programs, students take on varying responsibilities over the lifetime of the game. They receive development credit on the final shipped product.
While we are seeking to create entertaining games, we are also focused on games that have deeper meanings and messages. Games that explore personal and world issues through playful metaphor. We have three main pillars for this process:
Storytelling
We create interesting narratives about characters that have a sense of cultural and personal depth to which players can relate. By having such a connection with the characters, our players will feel a greater sense of draw towards our games.
Design
We strive to create interesting play that connects players viscerally to big ideas and experiences. Our biggest design tasks will revolve around deciding the most elegant way to solve some play problems that the experience creates.
Community
As we create games, we’ll be making the alpha and beta build, as well as the assets, publicly available. We hope to encourage people to remix and learn more about processes and pipelines. We’ll be making our general processes public via dev diaries to serve as a resource for others seeking to do similar things.
We look forward to having you all along on this journey of creation and exploration.