Summer School Game Design and Development 2024

From August 19-23, 2024, we had the pleasure of hosting this year’s Summer School Game Design and Development, organized by Dr. Sandes Bakkes and Dr. Julian Frommel and supported by Jens Steenmetz and Philip Tap. We had the pleasure of welcoming 23 students from various countries and a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to Utrecht. The students had the opportunity to learn the basics of game design through a series of engaging lectures and the basics of game development with workshops. Then, they worked in groups to design and develop their own games in just a few days. This year’s theme was Pandas. Below you can find a few impressions from summer school and the games.

Pitches for the Developed Games

Help Panny and Bunda get through the maze before the time runs out in Bamboo Escape! Forced to flee to the protected part of the bamboo forest by loggers, they must make their way through the maze, picking up food along the way. But uh-oh, it turns out pandas don’t have the strongest maternal instincts and Bunda’s baby is lost somewhere in the maze! Will you try to retrieve her baby, or try to make out of the maze as fast as possible? Play Bamboo Escape and help them survive!


Our game Polar Panda is a tough point and click quiz game for the web. The player assumes the role of a panda trying to immigrate to the North Pole. They have to memorise clues on the walls and in the travel guide before their appointment, where the quiz begins. The game is an analogy to the eternally confusing immigration process.
!SPOILER!: The catch is, that the questions get increasingly more difficult and less and less related to the actual topic of moving to the North Pole. One wrong answer – game over. The player is expected to replay the game multiple times, before catching up on the fact that it is unbeatable.

Play here: https://loetch.itch.io/polar-panda


Bumbles’ Bamboo Crush is a strategic physics-based game where players indirectly control a lazy but clever panda called Bumbles who constructed a catapult out of bamboo. A lady panda has recently been in the area, and she isn’t making it easy for poor Bumbles, as she carved pieces of her phone number high in the bamboo plants, deep into the forest.

Our hero panda is too lazy to climb to collect the phone number, so he is determined to use his catapult to collect the pieces. The forest is filled with evil invasive bunnies, who have made their home in pieces of the bamboo plants and will defend their home violently if the panda happens to hit the piece they live in.

Players control the power and angle of the catapult, and have to strategically arc the panda to hit as many bamboo pieces as they can. They can use this bamboo to upgrade their catapult and reach further stalks of the forest. The player has to also avoid the evil bunnies, as the panda can only hit them three times before he has to go to the hospital and the game resets.

The game ends with the panda collecting all pieces of the lady pandas’ phone number, where after he will ask her on a date via text message.


You were chosen as a manager of the new “Utrecht panda breeding center”. Pandas are dying out and you are the last hope of saving their species. The Chinese government has lent you two of their pandas, but you’ve got only limited time to show them your abilities in panda husbandry. To make things worse, your grant request was denied, so you will have to secure funds some other way…

The pandas want to make babies only when they are well taken care of. Give them food, water and maybe even provide them with some toys. To pay for those, you will have to sell some of your pandas to private ZOOs. The happiest pandas are the most prolific in their litter size, but also very well financially evaluated if you sell them. Just remember that the point is to have more pandas, not money.

Beware the evil rabbits! They will infiltrate your panda pen and try to take it over. The pandas can’t compete with them. You will have to use some dirty tactics to stop their plans. Explode their burrows and smash the vermin with your trusty mallet. Don’t let them destroy your beautiful panda sanctuary!

Play here: Pandæmic by CoffeePlanet (itch.io)