DePaul Originals is a game development studio that is located within DePaul’s Loop campus. Its focus is the production of high quality game experiences that are delivered on commercial platforms.

The goal here is to provide our game students with the experience of working at a larger game studio on a large 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 developed over a couple years so student workers who participate may be only brought in to focus on a single portion of the game at any given time.

We focus on the Unreal Engine as our main development tool as we find the base tool set easy to compartmentalize allowing 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 development. 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 and that explore personal and world issues through playful metaphor. We have three main pillars for this process:

• Storytelling: We intend to create interesting narratives about characters  that have a sense of cultural and personal depth to which players can relate.
• Design: We will be striving to create interesting play that connects players viscerally to big ideas and experiences. Our biggest design tasks will typically revolve around trying to figure out the most elegant way to solve the play problems that the experience creates.
• Community: As we create games, we’ll be making the alpha and bet build publicly available, as well as making assets available, encouraging people to remix and learn more about processes and pipelines. We’ll be making our general processes public via dev and art diaries so that we can create a reference and resource for others seeking to do similar things.

We look forward to having you all along on this journey of creation and exploration.