Robot battling game nets award
Calgarian among developers from film school team
It contributes $3.2-billion a year to our GDP and employs some of the country’s most talented artists and storytellers.
But telling people you plan to spend your career developing video games still tends to raise eyebrows.
Calgarian Melvin Kwan has just returned from the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, where he showcased the game Zeta Busters.
Kwan was part of a four-person team from the Vancouver Film School who developed the game, which picked up the win at the first Entertainment Software Association of Canada’s Student Video Game Competition.
“A lot of people don’t really understand it when I tell them ‘I’m in game design,’” says Kwan. “They say ‘ What is that exactly?’ So it’s this whole routine where I try to explain what I do and what I’m working on.”
Zeta Busters was a school project for the team and the win allowed Kwan, Brian Yich, Charles Park, Justin Ostensen to represent Canada at E3, the largest trade show for the entertainment software industry in the world.
Not a bad entry into the competitive world of video-game design, especially considering the team had to deliver a finished product in only two semesters.
Zeta Busters is a strategic, tactics-based game with a fairly simple storyline. Four heroes battle robots in a pastel-coloured city.
Kwan was the team’s only artist — Yich, Park and Ostensen worked as programmers. It was up to Kwan to hand-draw the designs for the character sprites and animation for the game.
The former Central Memorial High School student spent a year at A lot of people don’t really understand it when I tell them ‘I’m in game design.’ They say ‘What is that exactly?’ Calgary’s Alberta College of Art and Design with the idea of becoming a commercial artist. But in 2013, he participated in a global game jam at the University of Calgary, an event where game developers gather to plan, design and create games in 48 hours.
He realized that game design might be his future.
“It had never really occurred to me before,” he says. “It really opened my eyes to this area of possibility. That’s when I decided to look into schools where I would be able to learn.”
Vancouver is certainly a good place to be as it’s considered one of the world’s hubs for video-game design.
“I’d like to apply my artistic skills in any way that I can,” says Kwan. “But I’m more industry in doing game design.”
evolmers@calgaryherald.com