On Wednesday, I made my way over to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Downtown Vancouver to attend the second annual Vancouver International Game Summit. This video game conference provides global perspectives on developing games for the next generation of consoles and features presentations from many of the leaders in the industry.
We all know that video game developers are getting increasingly influential and it certainly helps that I have been passionate about video games for as long as I can remember. The Vancouver International Game Summit (VIGS) provided a different perspective for me, because they approached it from the developer’s point of view, rather than from the gamer’s point of view.
In between Rock Band sessions with Stephen Fung, we attended a session hosted by Propaganda Games, the Vancouver development studio behind the recently released Turok game. In the session, they described a recent event that they held at the company wherein employees had to completely develop a game in less than five days. You are assigned your team members — there were about 7-8 people per team — on Monday morning and the completed game must be ready by early Friday afternoon.
This is one crazy timeline! They had to come up with a unique concept, create the artwork, and engineer the game from scratch in under a week. It just goes to show you how much talent is in the video game industry. Among the mini-games developed were a fighting game that involved the Rock Band drum set, a Viking adventure controlled by the pitch of your voice, and a game where you roam a retirement home as the Grim Reaper. Hilariously awesome stuff.
Enjoy the vid!
This may be a little off topic but I wish they would come up with new sporting events as fast as they come up with new video games. For example, instead of “bull riding”, I would like to see “elephant riding” or “black panther riding”. I think those events would be very fun to watch!
Wow – I’ve heard of film festivals that make movies in 48 hours, but a video game? That’s pure insanity.
Sounds like a good time! Of the one’s you mentioned though, the grim reaper one definitely sounds like something new and innovative!