Students present their video game to judges in a science fair-like fashion at the Oregon Game Project Challenge on May 18, 2024. The competition is for middle- and high-school students in Oregon.
Courtesy of the Oregon Game Project Challenge
According to Pew Research Center, a whopping 85% of U.S. teens play video games. But many of these teens are probably not making games themselves.
The Oregon Game Project Challenge offers them a chance to do just that. It’s an annual competition for middle- and high-school students in the state that has been turning gamers into video game creators since 2007. Participating teams are given a theme in the fall and have the entire school year to create a game of their own, from coding to art design and sound.
Andrew Scholer is the director of OGPC. He says that demand for the competition has grown over the years, from roughly 20 teams at its launch to nearly 90 teams and almost 300 participants competing in the 2023-2024 academic year.
“We really think we’ve got something that works well,” Scholer said. “Our biggest concern at this point is just capacity. We were limited in the number of teams we could invite this year just based on space available.”
Century High School's Toast Lads have won best-in-show at the Oregon Game Project Challenge in the past two competitions.
Courtesy of the Oregon Game Project Challenge
Jason Pelkey is a senior at Century High School in Hillsboro and the team lead for Toast Lads. In May, the team won best-in-show honors for the second year in a row.
He described feeling stuck playing games like Minecraft and instead wanted to explore concepts for games he wanted to play.
“I wanted to make games myself so that I could have the freedom to explore my own imagination,” he said. “With all these ideas running through my head, just being able to make them and play them myself sounded super fun.”
The Toast Lads winning game is called MARK3T M3TAL and is described as a mix of survival games like Raft and Don’t Starve Together, but set on a moving train — something Pelkey was passionate about. ”The idea that you could have a moveable base is such a novel concept for me, and a train is like the best thing you can do because you can add carts and it’s a pretty stable foundation to add stuff on, unlike a boat,” he said.
The best-in-show award was given to the Century High School team Toast Lads. It's called MARK3T M3TAL and involves resource gathering, upgrading your base and fighting enemies.
Courtesy of the Oregon Game Project Challenge
But working in the gaming industry can be risky. This year alone, more than 10,000 people who make video games have lost their jobs. Scholer says that while there are massive problems facing the industry now, he sees OGPC’s role not to create more developers, but help foster community and leadership.
“The skills that they’re developing in these projects both the technical and the project management and the working on teams, they’re hopefully gonna be able to apply these skills to some aspect of what they do,” he said.
Three members of Century High School's Toast Lads team working on their game, MARK3T M3TAL.
Courtesy of Jason Pelkey
As for Pelkey, he’s leaving the door open for future game development opportunities, especially lucrative ones.
“I’m more leaning towards cybersecurity,” he said. “But it would be a fun side project and I’ve heard stories about people who do that as a side job and eventually get rich because of it.”
Andrew Scholer and Jason Pelkey joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to discuss the Oregon Game Project Challenge. You can listen to the full conversation here:
