After the much successful outing of the Mindbox and NASSCOM team’s evangelistic initiative to encourage game developers with GameJam Titans in Bengaluru, it was now time for the ‘Oxford of the East’ to replicate if not take things up a notch being the fourth city in the six city tour.
The jamming for the college students and professional category took place at the scenic DSK Supinfocom, where all the arrangements were made for the participants well in advance.
The theme that was given to the school kids was to create a game using any platform or software around either ‘speed’ or ‘universe’, whereas the theme for the college/professional participants was a toss between ‘gravity’ and ‘animals’. The school kids were given a day’s tutorial on using Unity by the team at Mindbox, a week prior to the showcase date.
The student category saw 10 teams coming in comprising of nearly 50 kids, with the youngest participants being mere seventh graders and the oldest in class eleven. The jury for Pune comprised of Lokesh Suri, senior producer at Zapak Mobile Games; Nobert Cellier, principal, head of studies – video game at DSK Supinfocom; Sebastian, head of game design at DSK Supinfocom and Alexis Madinier, CEO, DSK Green Ice Games.
One of the jury members, Sebastian said: “These kids are really lucky to have such a platform for themselves and they are so young. I would like to applaud the effort of the organisers to think of such an initiative and executing it well, I just hope the kids enjoy themselves.”
With the choice being between ‘speed’ and ‘universe’, 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. I like the fact that these kids have really attempted to understand the concept and spent time in making a working model,” expounded Alexis.
The jury went across to each of the 10 participating teams and played & tested the games over the next five hours. 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 for the NASSCOM game developers conference in November.”
It was now the turn of the college/professionals from the city to showcase their games to the judges. There were 10 teams in all, which included 2 professional teams; the theme given to this category was a choice between ‘gravity’ or ‘animal’, and most of the teams attempted to incorporate both these elements in their games.
“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 well too, as there are a few teams from my college as well,” smiled Nobert Cellier.
The 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. The winning team was a group of four professionals from Re-Focus Labs who have earlier made a couple of games for the mobile platform, one of them being ‘Hues’.
“We are elated and ecstatic, we can’t believe we won, this was the first time that we created something for the PC build but we will certainly develop the game further and may even explore the mobile platform for the same,” beamed the Re-Focus Labs team.
Chapter four of GameJam Titans came to an end in Pune with a bang, and the city has certainly sprung a few good games; the next city on the cards is Mumbai, but that is a different story for a different day! Watch this space to catch all the news and updates on GameJam Titans.