Each year, the Fest IQP holds a final celebration of student work from the year, where students demo their creations and senior projects (MQPs) take part in interviews done by industry developers. These interviews are streamed live on twitch, and each group gets roughly 10-15 minutes of screen time.
In past years, we’ve had industry developers pair up and interview 2 games each, leading to a 30-45 min time commitment day of, and ~40 minutes to an hour for playing the relevant games (which will be sent in advance). This is a celebration of student work, so interview questions lean towards asking the team about what they are particularly proud of.
This has been a yearly tradition for IMGD, and is a laid-back event with food and socializing, with plenty of time to mingle with other local devs, as well as faculty and students.
Showfest was founded, organized, and hosted for many years by Prof. Dean O'Donnell. In the Spring of 2020, the event was adapted to an online format due to COVID-19, then re-imagined as a flashier live-streamed production by the 2021 conference IQP team, and adapted again to a fully hybrid format in Spring of 2021 to support both hybrid interviews/spectators and in-person festivities.
Recordings of past Showfest live streams can be found on the IMGD YouTube under “Playlists”. IMGD first began recording and publicizing the interviews in 2019 when the event was still fully in-person. Unfortunately, the recording of Showfest 2020 was lost except for a short clip captured by a viewer of the informal “after-party” where Dean played through the games while others hung out in the chat.