From a Student-Run "Indie Game Exhibition," See What Today’s Young People Are Creating and Playing

​summer vacation has always been a peak period for game event launches, and this "Indie Game Exhibition" might be the most "pure" event that Game Artists has participated in over the past two months.

Several Chinese international students from New York University's student-run college game club, NYU Gaming, took advantage of their summer break back home to host the second [Game Oasis] game exhibition in Shanghai.

More than 40 demos, 18 roadshows, and a public evaluation workshop... scattered across a venue of over 500 square meters. Indie games are moving away from many traditional exhibitions and toward college campuses, urban spaces, and small-scale curation scenarios.

Such a "game exhibition" is still quite far from business and transactions. But as the overall lead, Ruby, said, having run it for two consecutive years, the starting point remains the same: there are still many works on campus driven by passion, curiosity, and the desire to express, that haven't been seen by the public.

The entertainment industry has been talking about "super creation" this year, but the indie game field has long been the most concentrated place for it.

Most of the developers at the exhibition areas were students or small studios, with one or a few people handling everything from planning and art to programming and publishing. Teams participating in the roadshow had to clearly explain their gameplay and positioning within minutes; creators in the workshop had to accept public playtest feedback. The size of the on-site products was generally small, but the completion level of many works was already sufficient for players to test on the spot.

And the players these games attracted were also young people.

When the industry repeatedly asks what content young people are actually consuming, indie games have always provided an answer: works made by creators of the same age, directly responding to the interests of young players, are becoming a stable outlet for content consumption.

What Kinds of Games Are Today's College Students Making?​

A total of 18 works participated in this year's roadshow, covering various genres including text adventure, visual novel, interactive narrative, action, shooting, strategy, tactical RPG, tower defense, and party games.

The following are introductions to some of the roadshow games: First Half · Text Adventure / Visual Novel / Interactive Narrative

•"Dorim Department Store" (Idbony)——An OC visual novel about the chance encounter of a high school girl named Ringo who lacks inspiration for writing a song and goes out for a stroll. It includes NE/BE/TE endings, and the parts about creation and pressure are particularly striking.

•"Moonfall Dialogue" (Rashomon.D)——A choice-driven click-based visual novel. Hundreds of years later, the moon is about to fall. You choose to stay and witness it firsthand, clicking on the screen to collect fragments, triggering dialogues, and deducing the truth.

•"Oasis Trails" (Transparent Board)——A multi-ending post-apocalyptic visual novel. You take over a caravan that has lost its leader, allocating daily supplies and talking to teammates, gradually uncovering the story behind the commission.

•"Summer Syndrome" (Alice Future)——A sci-fi visual novel. Starting from a noble private school, an unexpected bond born from "financial embarrassment" connects events happening simultaneously in various places.

•"The Fortress That Responds to Everything" (Dark Swan Lab)——Possibly the world's first interactive video game based on a "knowledge lock."

•"The Missing Rolex" (Jay Has a Water Gun)——A missing Rolex, a newly moved-in neighbor, a face hated since school days; the suspense unfolds.

Second Half · Action / Shooting / Strategy / Tactical RPG / Tower Defense / Party

•"Bomb Island" (MaxJin Studio)——A voxel-style Bomberman-like action puzzle game. Use double bombs and bomb jumps to blast through three-dimensional levels, solving puzzles amidst explosions and danger.

•"Peace Island" (Pixel Core)——A top-down 2D dieselpunk loot-and-shoot game. You are a bounty hunter in lawless lands, exploring, building, and crafting weapons, fighting your way out before the island is consumed by a curse.

•"Lead Rain" (Wild Intelligence)——Both the protagonist and enemies die in one hit. Alternate between a sword and a pistol to eliminate infantry, artillery, and even entire armies in zero-error combat.

•"Dog of War" (Eureka!)——A third-person action adventure. You play as Beagle the Labrador, using a "dog twister" tail attack to fight against invaders and protect your home.

•"RhythmArc" (Unicat)——Rhythm shooting × Roguelike × high-speed combat. Fire to the beat of the music, experiencing the exhilaration of attacks and rhythm syncing together.

•"Night Fantasy" (Spring Leaf Games)——An indie SRPG combining roguelike progression with tactical RPG strategy. Lead three adventurers to storm the demon tower in a world of eternal night.

•"Lüyun Record" (Popo Cat Studio)——An original tactical RPG with a unique dynamic timeline system. Make decisions to adjust the order of actions between friend and foe, turning the tide of battle step by step.

•"Celestial Expeditionary Force" (Wooden Duo Xing Studio)——A Chinese-style tower defense game with art style and gameplay officially supported by Kingdom Rush. Lead heroes like General Guan on an expedition from Jiangnan to the Western Regions.

•"Chongzhen Simulator" (Giraffe Studio)——A strategy game developed using an AI model. You play as the Chongzhen Emperor, planning in the imperial court, where every choice affects the course of the era.

•"Blind Box Commander" (Jimu House)——A building block-style real-time strategy game. Units, buildings, and technologies are all randomly obtained through "blind boxes," making each game a completely new combination.

•"Doomsday Hoarding King Bye bye buy" (Yoland Studio)——A light strategy hoarding game. Judge disasters based on ambiguous broadcasts, rush into the supermarket to stock up crazily, and plan your warehouse.

•"Crush Party Game" (E304 Team)——An all-in-one offline party collection featuring Truth or Dare, MOTO, dice, etc. Playable on the spot.

Playtest Area · Other Game Introductions​

Visual Novel / Narrative: •"Insomnia Club" (Memo Studio)——An emotional visual novel addressing real-world issues. Play as a long-term insomniac urban office worker who meets people trapped by work, family, and self at a late-night club, leading to multiple endings through dialogue choices and a mood system.

•"The Empty Garden of the Impotent" (A Kind of Madness)——A chapter-based visual novel. Centered on the aimless youth Lu Zimu, it tells absurd stories about corporate slaves, containing adult themes and horror elements like "living spaghetti."

•"The Destination Welcoming Emu Ema" (Same-name Production Team)——A fan creation of Magical Girl Witch Trial. A linear text adventure featuring visual novel performances and a "judgment system" deduction mechanic.

Action / Shooting / Horror: •"Swinging Swamp" (chormic studio)——An action shooter set in an abandoned wetland where you swing and hang using spider silk, fighting against hostile creatures lurking in the micro-ecosystem.

•"IN (Intervention)" (VESSEL)——A first-person horror adventure. Operate a deep-space probe to complete tasks in a lost experimental space station. Each generator you restart brings the station one step closer to revival.

•"Touhou Kashingen" (Nishiki Murasaki Chou)——A pixel-art side-scrolling 2D action platformer with light roguelite elements, featuring random item/skill builds.

•"Horror Livestream" (Ray)——A horror game themed around spirit-hunting livestreams. Lock the door in an abandoned basement, fumble for batteries to power the elevator to escape, all while tens of thousands of viewers watch through bullet comments.

•"Wake Up" (Fried Sausage and Braised Meat Roll)——A first-person psychological thriller. Trapped in a lucid dream set in a childhood bedroom, the cycle tightens over ten nights, distorting reality and manipulating the dream.

Platform / Adventure / Exploration / Idle: •"Tammi (Aftertaste)" (Team Aftertaste)——A 2D platformer. Play as "Tammi," the tongue of a head chef who has lost his sense of taste, exploring a fantastic world made of body organs to regain flavor and passion.

•"Wildfire Deep Forest" (RottensharkStudio)——A desktop idle game. Play as a self-sufficient wild witch, automatically exploring and gathering during work and study, enjoying the fun of RPG building and collection.

•"Hunt the Strange" (Ludere Indie Game Mutual Aid Community)——A hand-drawn 2D side-scrolling action RPG. Play as an adventurer exploring the mysterious "City of No Faces."

•"The Nameless Tower Dwells in Water" (Noname)——A 3D action adventure / platformer / stealth narrative. Play as a dog protecting the last source of water in a dark world where you can only go downwards.

•"Plop! Diving Time" (Tinymo Games)——A healing ocean exploration collection adventure. Freely explore the seabed without oxygen limits, take photos, collect shells, and complete an ocean encyclopedia and diving log.

Strategy / Card Game / Tower Defense / Rhythm: •"Poker Warriors" (Poker Warriors)——A roguelike card battler centered on poker suits. Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, and Clubs affect survival, attack, money, and luck respectively. Build the strongest deck.

•"Corolla Strategy" (Peppermint Grass Games)——A deck-building × territory control strategy game. Deploy six racial cards to expand your territory on a randomly generated land.

•"Era Echo" (Xiangtian Zheng)——A strategic roguelike deck-building game set in a cosmic championship. Traverse nine eras in nine days, shaping nine versions of a hero to enter the duel.

•"Archechord" (ArcheprismStudio)——A top-down rhythm roguelite based on Jungian psychology. Combines roguelike building with a rhythm system, fighting through a sea of subconscious monsters to the beat of the drums.

•"Welcome to the Demon King's Castle" (Yitao Game Studio)——A tower defense real-time strategy AVG where you manage the Demon King's castle. Build rooms to form areas, fend off heroes, and expand the demon army, in an anime style.

Simulation Management / RPG / Survival: •"Underworld Village" (Stellar Perturbation)——A survival game set in the underworld after death. Hunt, gather, farm, work, and trade to establish yourself in the village of the dead, finding a way to be reborn and return to the cycle of reincarnation.

•"Otherworldly Forge Tycoon" (Sucrose Games)——A first-person forging and management simulator. Smelt, hammer, and attach handles to magical materials to create weapons, set your own prices, hire staff, and develop your humble forge into a legendary weapons shop in another world.

•"Mushroom Village" (DZGS)——A simulation management online game. Pick mushrooms in the forest, cook mushroom soup back in town. Some are poisonous, some have magical effects, and you can even "forcefully taste-test" your teammates.

•"Goulan Washa" (Suosuoban Game Studio)——A Chinese-style roguelite simulation management game. Manage a Washa venue in a fictional ancient setting, matching buildings, staff, and genres to complete tributes for the imperial court within a time limit.

•"Wind Song War Chronicles: Remnants of the Dragon" (Qingyu Group)——The dragon's footprints appear faintly, from the Star Tower to an ancient kingdom sleeping for a thousand years, a fantasy world where you write a destiny together with fated companions.

•"RD100: An Otherworldly Life Starting with Dice" (Yanlingxia)——An otherworldly life adventure RPG. After reincarnation, take on quests, make companions, learn skills, and grow from an unknown nobody into a legendary adventurer across the entire continent.

What the Game Developers Who Came to the Exhibition Had to Say​

•Bear Muddy (Vice President of Indie Light) | Overview of Chinese Indie Games 2014–2025 —— The essence of indie games is using games as a medium for self-expression, not as a tool for traffic monetization. On Steam, Scroll of Taiwu and Black Myth: Wukong have successively raised the bar. This decade has been a cognitive upgrade. The confidence of indie games rests on six words: big experience, small investment. Use limited technology to create an ultimate experience, achieving a maximum effect with minimal effort.

•Galaxy Lightbulb (Producer of University Hiking Disappearance Case and Suspicious Advertisement Investigation Case) | WIG (Web Puzzle Game) is the golden midpoint between traditional video games and hardcore ARGs. It uses realistic web pages to let anomalies erode the player's daily life, using the contrast between reality and fiction to activate the will to solve the puzzle. The low threshold actually led to a large number of creator explanations and player fan works. AI has expanded from writing code, generating images, and polishing text to generating ideas and creativity in the early stages.

•Rolan (Former AI Lead for Tencent Game Project, Co-founder of AI Game Company Talespark) | From Branching to Emergence: A Brief History of AI+ Games —— The evolution of AI games comes in four steps: AlphaGo's decision-making, ChatGPT's conversation, Stanford Smallville's simulation, and Cursor/Gemini 3's generation. The next step is the AI Director, letting AI orchestrate the entire experience like a director. But AI is just a lever to achieve a goal, because games are inherently designed for experience.

•Game Community Roundtable | Four communities—Ludere, Cybria, Game Living Room, and NYU Gaming—sat around a table to discuss the daily and extraordinary aspects of game community operations. The core retention factors for a community are shared values, an equal co-creative atmosphere, close physical connections, and meaningful, actionable exchanges. Ludere's motto sums up the original intention in one sentence: "Indie games don't walk alone."

•He Qian (Founder/Producer/Lead Designer/Lead Programmer of Liquid Meow Games) | The practical path from 0 to 1 for a student team. He analyzed the development history of Liquid Meow Games in detail, using cases such as team members, works, and award information to demonstrate that Liquid Meow Games has become a studio covering diversified businesses like game R&D, publishing, and co-branded licensing. He also honestly shared their real-world challenges from a practical perspective: small team, pitfalls they fell into, everyone a jack-of-all-trades.

•Jack (Lead Creator of the indie game Song of Maca, Manager of the "Wanderism" general game knowledge IP, AI Blogger) | Entering a New Era: A Self-Iteration Guide for Game Developers deconstructed the entire process of Song of Maca from project initiation to near release, also covering game community operation and social media account management. He also shared his learning methodology as a new-generation game developer and ways AI can improve efficiency in game research.