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Dutch Games Industry: Cannibal Game Studios Focuses on the Education Market

Yesterday I visited a Delft-based game tech company with a funny name, “Cannibal Game Studios”:http://www.cannibalgamestudios.com/, and I have to say I was intrigued with what I saw and heard. Three guys plus a part-timer and an intern strong, they’re tinkering away at a game engine specifically tailored for the educational market.

h2. Struggling with code

The problem the people at Cannibal are solving, according to them, is that traditional 3D and game engine software is just too broad for game development projects at computer science courses. They can know, because they worked on such a project themselves. A couple of years ago, while studying at the “Delft University of Technology”:http://home.tudelft.nl/en/, they were asked to create a simple video game. However, instead of building a game, they struggled with learning C++ to get anything interactive at all out of the 3D engine they used.

Ironically, the ‘games’ they built back then serve as the perfect pitch for their product. The games were slow, buggy and ugly. They didn’t contain much gameplay at all. When they later showed me games made by students with a previous iteration of what will be released as ‘Cannibal Experience’ later this year, the contrast was obvious.

The engine seems to be fun to use, too. “We had students pulling all-nighters because they liked working with it so much,” Remco Huijser, Cannibal’s director of communications, told me. “That has to be a unique situation.”

Above: ‘Faith’, a game built using Cannibal’s software.

h2. Spikes

Cannibal offers what’s basically a programming environment specifically geared towards building games, with easy to use chunks of programming code. A future version should offer a full virtual world, where teachers can choose to disable specific layers such as the artificial intelligence, challenging students to come up with their own AI code.

Other focus points are tools for communication between students — especially designers and programmers, who seem to have a kind of love-hate relationship — and “agile programming techniques”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_programming. The structure of their engine encourages iteration — quickly building new versions instead of writing a huge spec, programming for weeks or months, then putting everything together — and so-called ‘spikes’, quick hacks that prototype a single new game mechanic.

h2. Gold mine

It seems to me that this is one of these companies that stumbled, almost by accident, on a business model that could be quite lucrative. Consider that after the Cannibal founders completed their messy game project at university, their original plan was to prove they actually could create something cool. But thanks to circumstances, they focused on a game engine instead, to be used in next year’s course.

The model is simple, really. Creating a small game is on most computer science courses’ curriculum. And then there are the game design courses that are popping up everywhere. Most of these schools are probably interested in software like this. Now Cannibal just needs to make sure its product actually delivers what it promises. With a strong focus on usability and the end user, I think they might just succeed.

Another challenge will be reaching all these potential customers. Schools have a budget for software like this and they pay on a per-student basis. That sounds like a goldmine, but actually marketing and selling Cannibal Experience might be quite a challenge for this bunch of computer science nerds – even though they took some business classes. Luckily, they hinted at some deals a signature away from being struck, so here’s hoping that Cannibal Game Studios is going to make it big.