CEDARVILLE, Ohio — Cedarville University seniors Josiah Lansford and Jeb Bishop are video game experts in the making.

The classmates are celebrating the completion of their first high-tech video game called GameStonks, a play on the GameStop stock market rush.

“It was just a fun little game that we made to kind of fit into that moment and just have fun with it,” Lansford said.

The game had to be created in 48 hours to be a part of the Global Game Jam Challenge.

“The big part of that is you just have to decide at the very beginning to throw away all your perfectionism and go through it as quickly as you possibly can,” Lansford said.

Bishop said the game concept had to be fun and easy for people to pick up.

“Buy stocks, sell stocks, punch people,” Bishop said. “That was what we ran with. I think that keeping the rest of it reigned in, was really critical to it being a pretty complete product at the end.”

Professor George Landon, Ph.D. said students love participating in this challenge because it’s something fun that helps them grow at the same time.

“There is pressure,” Landon said. “When they graduate there is pressure, in school there’s pressure, right. There’s always timelines, things are due, due dates are there, ever-present when you’re in school and even when you graduate. Constraining that to focusing on a fun activity that also is deadlined, I think, is really helpful.

In total, 17 Cedarville students worked together to create five different games for the challenge, which Bishop said was a great learning experience having to work under a tight deadline.

“I think that it was a really good opportunity to push myself a little bit to the limits of sleep, time, and focus,” Bishop said. “And to be able to collaborate with someone really closely, and turn something out really quickly.”

The new games include Game Stonks, Closing Soon, Glipglop in Space, Janitorial Justice, and Rotatris.

The games are published for free to play online.