The Winter Showcase highlights some of the best and most innovative work created by Digital Media students at York University in the fall semester 2025,
Sandwich Dilemma
Charelle Santo Domingo
Sandwich Dilemma is a card game set in Tabletop Simulator which is inspired by the fast paced food industry environment, This game requires each player to choose a strategic outcome by making your sandwich based on the preferences of each new customer. The more ingredients you have chanced across, the more likely you are to win over the customer! However, each customer is different so make sure your cards align with customer needs and don’t upset them, or else you will lose your points. Each playthrough is limited to 15 minutes.
Reliable Unreliability
Kalyani Sivakumar
Every story needs a Narrator, but can yours be trusted? In literature, a narrator’s reliability often depends on how much emotional vulnerability is revealed to the audience. Reliable Unreliability transforms this literary tension into a game. You are now a Narrator; it’s your choice whether you’re trying to be Unreliable or Reliable. The catch? Show too much emotional vulnerability and you risk shattering into nothing more than a sob story; guard too much and no one will believe you at all. To succeed, Narrators must carefully balance their vulnerability and guarded appearance to be recognized as truly either Unreliable or Reliable. Will the audience believe you, or will you lose yourself in the process?
The Collector
Hien (Kai) Duong Thanh Vo
The Collector is an adaptation of my card game The Salemen, where the player takes on the role of a young man who has been struggled with his business, especially when his Grandma passed away a few month ago. The main character’s Grandma left him a precious Chest, yet its 4 Keys are nowhere to be found. The game takes its players to a small adventure around the town interacting with the neighbourhood, buying, selling and collecting stuffs, while looking for the lost keys. I tried my best to implemented most of the main mechanics of my original card game, including collecting sets of items, bargaining, cursed, and trade as parts of the story line to create a fun and engaging game to my players. I really hope the game is interactive and enjoyable!
Ghosts of the Deep
Sam Genovese, Samuel Ollmann-Chan, Calvin Tang
Ghosts of the Deep is a project made in response to a specific type of ocean pollution, ghost nets. Ghost nets are fishing nets that are abandoned or discarded by fishermen and left in the ocean ecosystem. Ghost nets choke out coral reefs, impact fish feeding grounds, and trap fish. The player’s goal is to navigate the environment to find shoals of krill to feed themselves as a seahorse constantly. If the player starves from hunger, the experience ends. Using an Xbox Kinect, the project tracks the player’s body movements to control the seahorse character in the game, allowing players to become physically immersed in the struggles of a seahorse.
Hands in for Renewal
Gareth Davey, Lydia (Liangdi) Liu, Zhiyuan Zhou
Hands in for Renewal is an interactive digital experience that challenges the dominant presupposition that nature is a static and inert commodity for human use. Instead, it encourages users to become part of nature’s ongoing story and recognize it as a living and dynamic agent. To achieve this, the experience engages participants in embodied behaviors within a dynamically responsive natural world, fostering constructive relationships between humans and the often unheard voices of the environment. Central to the project is Ideonella sakaiensis, a microorganism capable of transforming plastic waste into bacterial fuel sources that naturally break down. This bacteria is not a miracle solution, cultivating this bacteria still requires human responsibility. Built in p5, Hands in for Renewal invites users to use their hands to experiment in this responsibility with a digital depiction of the bacteria as its behavior constantly changes to reflect the ecosystem’s shifting health.
Maywood Forest: Crystal Hunters
Sheena Cariazo
Maywood Forest: Crystal Hunters is an interactive visual novel, weaving mystery, myth, and exploration. Players step into the wings of a chosen fae, venturing
RADIO DATT3074
Sofia Metallo, Yingwen Fan, Thu Huong Nguyen, Joseph Palma, Calvin Tang, Stefan Sreckovic, Cristian Spangaro, Zeta Sovery, Spencer Samra, Karim Samji, Syd Rhodd, Autumn Pham, Uday Pal, Cecilia Nguyen, Cassandra Hutchinson, Marce Higuera, Eric Hanson, Harrison Fok, Jayden Anderson-Johnson, Adam Abdillahi.
RADIO DATT3074 is a generative radio station with many channels to explore. On each channel, the sound is continuously generated on the fly, responding to the current date and time to ensure it is always evolving. It was authored using gen~ and RNBO in Max.
http://alicelab.world/datt3074/2025/radio/index.html?fs=1&timeout=60000
FILIPINAFFIRMATIONS (2025)
Jubelle Paa
Tagalog affirmations (both in the English alphabet and pre-colonial Filipino script, Baybayin) appear in the style of projected screen lyrics over videos with modern Christian church influence. Each video is a mantra that reflects the unrealistic standards of Filipina women in the diaspora in relation to sacrificial labour, religious expectations, and familial needs.
Bioluminescent
Tsz Him Ng
Bioluminescent is an interactive piece with hand motion gesture detection that mimics the natural bioluminescent phenomenon. The piece has a flocking particle simulation which changes colours and sounds depending on the hand motion and gestures. The flocking particle boids could be interacted with the hand gesture detection like creating new boids with a flick of the fingers or disturbing their grouping with quick hand movements.
https://editor.p5js.org/DerpfaceJr/full/c3lZI9Z-F
Circle of Creation
Gurkanwal Nijjar
Circle of Creation is an interactive generative artwork that turns a short questionnaire into a personal Magic Circle. The design goal was to visualize a user’s inner state; Mental noise, preferred environments, and aesthetic choices through geometry, motion, sound. Ensuring each circle feels unique but still belonging to the same system.
https://editor.p5js.org/Principle/full/LQgQHC2YS
Retro-Tron Runner
Abigail Rodrigues
Retro-Tron Runner is a cyberpunk brush-like avatar that blends motion, brushed, and procedural world generation into a responsive and stylised environment inspired by Tron, synthwave, and cyberpunk design. The core idea is to transform a traditional player character into somewhat of a living brushstroke.
https://editor.p5js.org/rodrigua/full/9MF463Mou
Arcane Archive: A Magical Sorting Game
Jasmine Porter
Arcane Archive is an interactive magical storting game that combines animation, particle systems, sound design and visual effects. You as a magical being are tasked by organizing mystical books, items and artifacts on shelves and the table before time runs out. Each item (books, potions, crystals, and a quill) are conjured from a bubbling cauldron and must be dragged into its correct slot. The game blends whimsical fantasy visuals, all drawn by me, dynamic physics and a time-pressure puzzle mechanic to create an immersive environment.
https://editor.p5js.org/jclp23/full/lDbZAGPL1
Brain Roast
Qianhua Liu, Wen Luo
Brain Roast is a sculptural installation where a silicone brain rests on top of a modified coffee machine, treated as both raw ingredient and sacrificial offering. The machine becomes a small monster with teeth and a tongue, endlessly “processing” thoughts and emotions. On its display, system-like messages such as “Memory Roast” and “Overthinking Mode” flicker like a mental interface. In the pot below, what drips out is not coffee but a symbolic extract of memories, desires, and feelings.
Nostalgic Noisefield
Shadi Karimpour, Abdullah Al Fuad, Hana Namdar, Johnny Tahhan, Ivan Ng, Kiana Misaghi
Nostalgic Noisefield is an interactive artwork that blends digital artwork, natural movement, and DIY sensibilities into a single immersive experience. The piece uses a flocking algorithm to generate bird-like forms that navigate across a digital mountainscape where order and chaos coexist. Viewers can control hue, blur, spacing, and flock size through physical potentiometers and buttons, making them active participants in shaping the system rather than passive observers. Inspired by nostalgia, analog textures, Nam Jun Paik’s soft visual style, Stardew Valley’s cozy atmosphere, and the dynamics of basketball movement, the project repurposes familiar elements into something new. It also engages with the class theme “DIY, Fix, Remake” as we repurposed many different materials and elements to be used in our project. Together, the visuals, sound, and interactivity create a calm, reflective, and playful digital environment.
