RIT student video game wins big at GameFest 2024

At RIT, award-winning student games spring up like mushrooms.

A team of students won the Grand Prize at GameFest 2024 for developing Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword. The platformer game follows Mica, a little mushroom on a journey to claim a powerful weapon and rescue its village after the residents are captured by a gigantic bird. A demo of the game is available on Steam, with a more complete game currently in development.

GameFest, held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in April, is an annual showcase of student talent in game development. The competition brings together students from around New York state and the Northeast to exhibit their games. Thirty-eight games were accepted this year.

“Since it’s a more public event and they only allow so many submissions to showcase their games, just getting in is a small success,” said John Haley, a third-year game design and development major who worked on Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword. “Winning the Grand Prize is a dream come true. Having all the work put into the game to make it a professional well rounded experience and being acknowledged for that work done is incredible.”

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Ugly the Cat: Missiles and Mayhem was named a finalist at GameFest 2024. The RIT student-created game was made for a production studio course involving the PlayStation 5 dev kit.

Three other RIT student games were named finalists at the 2024 competition, including:

• Ninjas on Trampolines—finalist in the Excellence in Design, Stupid Fun (to Play) category.
• Value—finalist in the Excellence in Design category.
• Ugly the Cat: Missiles and Mayhem—finalist in the Technical Excellence category.

How did Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword grow?

The idea for Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword sprouted in 2022 from the Game Music Jam hosted by Berklee College of Music. For the collaborative jam, game developers were given one week to make a game. Then composers were randomly assigned to each game and given one week to make music for it.

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The prototype for the game, called Sword of Morel, won the Game Music Jam. The original game creators included Haley; Twig Sheherlis, a third-year game design and development major; Amanda Rowe, a third-year game design and development major; Liam Armitage, a third-year game design and development major; Dariel Ravelo-Ramos, a third-year game design and development major; Tyler Samay, a third-year game design and development major; and Ethan Lin, a third-year computer engineering major. It also included music composition work from Florida Polytechnic University student Andrew Ptaszek and Berklee College of Music student Quinne Houck.

In the game, players meet Grandmashroom, who leads them to a mysterious temple to claim the Blade of Grass—a powerful weapon with the ability to pull Mica up ledges and over dangerous obstacles. Players take control of the sword that they can move in full 360-degree movement in order to climb up obstacles and ledges found throughout the game.

“It’s similar to games like Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy and Deepest Sword, but less rage inducing and more focused on fun mastery of the mechanic,” said Haley.

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In Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword, players must time their jumps and angle the blade to overcome challenges and traverse a mystical world.

In 2023, the game was submitted and accepted into RIT’s MAGIC Maker Program, which provides students with the funding, studio space, and mentoring support to manage their own digital media projects and prepare them for publication and investment-readiness. The team’s goal was to have a demo completed by the end of the program. That demo won the GameFest 2024 Grand Prize.

“Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword has been an engaging and challenging experience in learning what it takes to attempt to take a game all the way,” said Haley. “Learning the financial, marketing, and publishing side of game development has been an interesting process and I am happy to do it with such fantastic team members.”

The core team of current game creators hope to make the complete game a reality and submit it to more competitions. They launched a Kickstarter to help create a full release of the game.