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.”