To mark the University of Bremen’s 50th birthday, computer science and digital media students have developed an online game in which it is possible to discover the campus in a 3D, low poly version. “Low poly” is a design style that is based on the polygon nets in 3D computer graphics. Some may know the style from video games from the late nineties. We spoke to the student Minh Due Vu about the game.

Mr. Vu, how did it come about that you and your fellow students decided to show the university campus of all places in low poly?

The development was part of our “50 Years of the University of Bremen” bachelor’s project led by Dr. Nina Wenig and Dmitry Alexandrovsky from the Digital Media working group at the Center for Computing Technologies (TZI), University of Bremen. We’re a team of 17 students and we asked ourselves: What do we actually know about the university and its history? Then we had the idea to show the campus to the students who began their studies during the pandemic. After all, they were hardly able to get to know their uni during the online semesters in 2020 and 2021. And that turned into a digital tour of the campus with many small games along the way. We also wrote an accompanying scientific paper.

How did you realize the project during the online semester?

It was definitely good training in terms of self-organization. As it was not possible for us to meet up face to face, all meetings were held digitally. One of the requirements of the project was that each person spends some time on every team, thus in the areas of development, marketing, game design, rights, and therefore has the opportunity to dive deeper in this way. It was obviously a special challenge for the teams to completely restructure every couple of weeks. But it gave us the chance to get to know the project from all angles and find out what we are particularly good at - or not good at. Alongside the project, we also started to take part in classes on the university’s history and also game design and documenting gaming experience. The classes were offered by different faculties. In this way, we were not only able to work across the teams but also in a very interdisciplinary manner.

What is special about the game’s design?

We consciously decided on a low poly design. It was possible to portray the campus in a simpler manner in this way. We tried to model everything to scale as best as was possible and based our work on already existing 3D models of the university and information from Google Maps.

What can players expect from “Low Polyversität Bremen”?

An informative and fun tour of the campus. Initially, you meet Willy - a turtle who has kept a chronological collection of the happenings at the University of Bremen for over 50 years. After a first test, Willy sends the player on their travels. Every mini game that you can find is allocated to one decade of the university’s history. I don’t want to give away too much though - the best thing would be to test it out yourself.

More Information

The link to the The link to the “Low Polyversität Bremen” game.