Students from across Atkins HS gathered to observe and test the original games created by the talented students in Atkins’ Game Art Design major on May 2’s Game Expo, which featured games both virtual and tactile. The Game Expo is a recurring event at Atkins, and was formerly hosted twice within the span of the academic year before being consolidated into one yearly event celebrating the problem-solving and creativity of students with an interest in game design.
Among the games featured was Dead High, a polished puzzle-based video game created within the industry-standard platform Unreal Engine by Atkins students Joshua Jackson, Everett Benton Padgett, Ian Passmore, and Alejandro Pedro. The game combines the stylish art created by Padgett with unique gameplay made possible by Pedro, Passmore, and Jackson, and centers around a student at the titular “Dead High” exploring the school’s corridors to locate the misplaced body parts of Frankie, an undead student.
The game’s unique premise was inspired by a prompt assigned to the team based on the Health Science major at Atkins, which pitched a game following “a zombie high school where kids are losing their organs,” Padgett recounted. However, while the prompt may have been straightforward, the development process was anything but. “Every time we would do something, there would be five new bugs we’d have to spend the whole day figuring out… We could have a flourishing and wonderful environment, but that wouldn’t matter if the mechanics didn’t work,” Padgett described when asked about the challenges faced by the team, which is known as S.M.O.G. (Standard Mode of Gaming) Studios. Despite the difficulties navigated by the team, the members of S.M.O.G. Studios were undoubtedly successful in creating an enjoyable game, which was nominated for Game of the Year at the Atkins Game Expo.
The roster of student-created games at the event also included Polar Shift, an innovative title developed by Aiden Gonzalez, Jaye Hyde, Christopher Martinez Meza, and Oscar Medina-Carrillo. The game, which was created under Atkins’ recently-introduced Career Game Art Design course, flaunts an unexpected sense of humor and novel gameplay mechanics, notably the ability to invert gravity for traversal purposes. “[The mechanic of inverting gravity] was honestly one of the first things that we planned,” Hyde responded when asked about the origins of the gameplay for Polar Shift, citing inspiration from the video games Portal and Mario Galaxy.
Alongside the unique gameplay, the three-dimensional models seen in Polar Shift were also created in their near-entirety by Medina-Carrillo, who also worked alongside Hyde and Gonzalez at the 2025 Camel City Game Jam as a three-dimensional artist. The game has garnered significant interest from Atkins students and beyond, and the team behind Polar Shift is currently working to publish the game on Steam, a digital game storefront featuring some of the most popular games in the past decades. Among these students who have indicated their interest in purchasing the game from a digital storefront is Graham Davis, who dedicated himself to “speedrunning” Polar Shift, discovering the most rapid and efficient pathways to complete the game. The game’s developers were excited to witness the support their project has received from fans after the culmination of months of work in developing the game, and have hinted at future content being considered for development.
The teams behind Dead High and Polar Shift were only two of the many groups whose creations were exhibited during the Game Expo, all of whom have demonstrated their talent in game design with their work. From carefully-crafted board game pieces to astounding virtual models, the students across Atkins’ Game Design courses have undoubtedly inspired others to explore the potential of game development through their involvement in the 2025 Atkins Game Expo.