After the much successful outing of the Mindbox and NASSCOM team’s evangelistic initiative to encourage game developers with GameJam Titans in Chennai, it was now time for the ‘City of Nawabs’ to replicate if not take things up a notch being the second city in the six city tour.
To start off, things didn’t go as planned because of the ‘Ganesh Chaturti’ festival falling on a Friday, the day when the jamming commences; thus the organisers decided to keep the show going and requested the college participants to create the game beginning Thursday night, 28 August and submit the executable file online on Saturday night, 30 August and come by to the venue – ICBM School of Business Excellence – on Sunday afternoon after the school kids had showcased their respective games to the jury members.
The theme that was given to the school kids was to create a game using any platform or software around either ‘pollution’ or ‘maze’, whereas the theme for the college/professional participants was a toss between ‘rock’ or ‘grass’. The school kids were given a day’s tutorial on using Unity by the team at Mindbox, a week prior to the showcase date.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com Mindbox CEO Rishi Khemka said: “After looking at the turnout for the Chennai event, I am confident that the other cities are going to take this competition seriously. As this is not just going to act as a platform for them to display their games, but also interact with folks from the industry at such a young age and learn from them on what should they do right to make it big in this booming industry.”
The student category saw 14 teams coming in comprising of nearly 90 kids, with the youngest participants being mere sixth graders and the oldest in class eleven. The jury for Hyderabad comprised of a fairly young bunch of guys from the gaming industry – Safal Kapoor, game designer at EA Sports; Vatsal Chintalapati, project manager/game designer at Purple Talk and Zainuddin Fahad, founder/director/artist at Ogre Head Studio.
One of the jury members, Vatsal said: “These kids are really lucky to have such a platform for themselves at such a tender age, and they are also getting to learn so much. I would like to applaud the effort of the organisers to think of such an initiative and executing it well.”
With the choice being between ‘pollution’ and ‘maze’, the kids created some really interesting games and some just blew away the minds of the jury keeping in mind that most of these games were created in just over five or six days.
“These are not just some random games which these kids have made; there is a lot of thought that has gone behind the game play apart from response and interactivity with the player. A couple of games can directly hit the stores with a little polishing and they would sell like hot cakes,” expounded Safal.
The jury went across to each of the 14 participating teams and played & tested the games over the next four hours, before finally coming to the conclusion that there would be a mention of the top five teams in the school category, among which the runners-up and the winner will receive cash vouchers worth Rs 2,000 from flipkart, medals and a small silver and gold trophy respectively.
The winner was a game called ‘Go Green’. The game aptly adopted both the themes of ‘pollution’ and ‘maze’ in its game play and were deserving winners [and a personal favourite too], the game was developed using softwares like Unity and Photoshop within five days.
On winning in the school category, the team members jointly said: “We really would like to thank the organisers for coming to our city and giving us an opportunity to not just participate in this contest, but also be trained in using the Unity software and create a game that we believed in. We can’t wait to come to Pune in November for the NASSCOM game developers conference.”
It was now the turn of the college/professionals from the city to showcase their games to the judges. There were 14 teams in all, which included 2 professional teams from Gameshastra; the theme given to this category was a choice between ‘rocks’ or ‘grass’, and most of the teams attempted to incorporate both these elements in their games.
The jury begun to go around the 14 teams to decide the runners-up and the winner for this category; “Since these guys are a little more trained and are pursuing a career in gaming, they should be better equipped in using the various softwares and create a product that can be a standalone commodity for the marketplace. I have high expectations from this category and hope they do too,” smiled Zain.
The three member jury was reasonably surprised with the result, and the thought that went behind each game. Most of the games used both the themes in their gameplay and tried using different mechanics for their games.
At the end of the judging process, the jury found their winners in a team from I-CAT which created a game interpreting ‘rock’ as ‘music’ with ‘Rock The Beats’ where there is a grid puzzle and has a rockstar ball attempting to cross each level; the agenda of the game is to cross each level, while continuously monitoring the size of the ball as per the musical notes playing in the background.
“We are elated and ecstatic, we can’t believe we won. We put in a lot of hardwork and were much focused that we had to complete the game in the stipulated time, though we barely slept for even four hours in the last two days. We would like to thank the organisers for this great initiative and would certainly like to come once again to GameJam Titans Two,” beamed the team from I-CAT.
Chapter two of GameJam Titans came to an end in Hyderabad with a bang, and the city has certainly raised the bar for the other remaining cities as the action now shifts to the ‘Garden City’ of Bengaluru, but that is a different story for a different day! Watch this space to catch all the news and updates on GameJam Titans.