So this week I will talk about my studio's trip to Unity Up-- I mean Level Up. Haha, just kidding U of T you can design games well. But seriously, Level Up was a great experience and my team really enjoyed being there, despite not having a spot and having to create our own station from left over tables and chairs laying around the room.
At level up, there were a variety of different schools participating in the event. Schools from all across Ontario such as UOIT (us), U of T (our rivals) Brock (game of the year winners), and many others such as Centennial, George Brown, Humber, OCAD, Seneca, Sheridan, Trios, and York. The event took place on April 3, 2013 and was between 5-11 for the public audience. For us avid and dedicated game devs, the party started at 10am so we could get everything set up for this glorious event. Now when you think about it, for us in Oshawa who don't want to drive downtown, the day started at 7am so we could get ready and make the commute from the school to the train station and to union plus the time it takes being lost in down town, I will always follow Phil's directions over mine from now on. Then to miss the train by about five minutes and having to wait for the next one plus the drive homes clocks you back at home for 12:30 ish. Regardless of the long day, it remained a great day.
When we got to level up our team first established priorities: find power, and obtain internet access. The game needed some fine tuning for a public audience. Our major fine tune was to make it completely controller accessible. Then once we did that we realized that we have all of our UI showing aids for the keyboard controls so we needed to go in and change the images to work for the controllers. We then tried updating all of the art but time was running out before 5pm so without stable internet our station ended up having two different games art wise. It was ok because only a few people noticed and they were all from our school.
During the actual event it was cool to see my family there and Phil's family show up along with Justin's family having them all play our games. I didn't get much of a chance to go around myself and see the games because I was busy running our station all day. No one else in my group had as much enthusiasm as me to get people to play through our game. We really needed to put an effort in to getting people to play our game because we didn't have a giant T.V or even a computer monitor. We had two laptops with the game running as well as a laptop with our social media set up on it such as our website, facebook page, and twitter feed.
Speaking of Twitter! we had someone follow our studio at Level Up. So proud guys, good job! Unfortunately in terms of Twitter and our business cards, the connect was spelled wrong on the back of the card. That was a let down but at least our email was right on the back. The business cards in general were quite the let down as the cards had no room on them to write extra on since it was all black. They were also very pixelated so it was hard to read in general. What made these cards worse was the fact that all of the information wasn't actually on the back. We were missing the facebook link, phone number, and most importantly the website for our studio! We handed them our none the less because we wanted people to still have something so they can get in contact with the studio.
Since this is apart of my computer graphics blogs, I should probably say some things about the graphics I saw at Level Up. For the most part, UOIT did the best job on "from scratch" graphics and engines. By that I mean, they built there engine and graphics from the use of graphics libraries and shader languages, not some engine source someone else made. This looks impressive but only if you know it is developed from the ground up. When you set it next to a game made from UDK or CryTeck it will be no competition for the source engines. Now most of our competitors at Level Up were using some sort of source engine which eliminated a lot of development time because the engine for their game was already constructed and functioning properly.
Now that I've got that out of the way, the graphics in the other games were really good! They had art styles that matched and color palettes that meshed smoothly. When I did have a brief chance to ask some of the other teams how they obtained such nice graphics they said they used Unity or some other game engine. I would then go on to ask what shaders they had in their game and most of them didn't even know what a shader was! It was disappointing to hear that they didn't know what shaders are because shaders are awesome and could have made their games look that much better(I stretched my arms out really far). Funny thing was, they had certain shader algorithms functioning in their games such as shadow mapping and motion blur and they didn't even notice that it was in fact a shader creating these effects.
At the end of that day, everyone from my studio including myself had a great time and was well worth the hard work and dedication to be there. If there was one thing I could have suggested to improve the event is to have better opportunities to socialize with game development industry professionals. I did have a chance to talk to some reps from big viking games and uken games but there were so many other big companies there like ubisoft and Blizzard Entertainment! Just kidding, I wish Bliz was there. It would've been great to have an opportunity to talk to Ubisoft employees but I didn't get a chance at the night of the event. Talking to Big Viking Games was probably better anyways because they are closer to my level of skill, only change is I would need to learn HTML 5 because that's what they program their mobile games in.
To wrap things up, this was a great experience because I was able to meet industry professionals and I was able to get lots of feedback on my game and developing games. This gave incentive to hopefully produce something over the summer and try to make it to Level Up on crack! Also known as IGF or Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. By the way, (side note for Dr. Hogue, there are two teams that I know of that are taking you up on your deal that you announced in class regarding IGF) there would've been more attempting to go if it was all inclusive.
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