Games Made in 5 Days

Graduate students at Carnegie Melon University have devised a program called the Experimental Gameplay Project, in which four students in the school's Entertainment Technology Center attempt to design and develop 13 games each over the course of a semester.

The philosophy behind the project was that complexity is not necessary for fun, and that it is possible to have fun even with simple primatives if given a compelling interaction and goal. The project gained a lot of exposure and positive response from gamers and people in the game industry, and was deemed a success. The Experimental Gameplay Project is now into it's second semester, with a new team of four graduate students. Their goal is to develop 52 playable games, not tech toys, by the end of the semester. All games will be posted to this site on a weekly basis.

Each week, they work with a different theme, and last week's batch of games based on the theme "Turn-Based Games" has just been posted. The site features the most recent game from each of the four students as well as the highest-rated games over the course of the project. Some of them are a lot of fun! I just wasted a bunch of time with Nexus.