Game developers see hope for local tech industry

It all started with a hot-air balloon and a slingshot.

They only existed in Taylor Eichhorst’s head. Then he turned his idea into code, building a prototype for a 3-D balloon-based brawl. A year and a half later, Eichhorst and his business partner have transformed it all into a virtual-reality video game called Balloonatics — and a budding company based in Regina.

“I always wanted to make it look like a Saturday morning cartoon,” Eichhorst said. “Just fun, colourful, bright.”

Eichhorst was among a small group of Regina-based video game developers showing off their creations at the Conexus Arts Centre on Sunday. Saskatchewan has never been a serious player in the video game industry, which is worth more than $100 billion in annual revenues globally. But the people at Sunday’s showcase think new technology has made location irrelevant, opening the door for Regina to get a bigger piece of the action.

“There is the talent here to make it happen,” said Kai Hutchence, an organizer behind the event. “The key is you need to be able to take our interest and our hobbyists here and give them that professional polish.”

Hutchence is the founder of Massive Game Studios. He chose the name about a week ago. So far, it’s just him — but he has big plans. He recently moved back home to Regina after working in the betterestablished video game scene of London, Ont.

He said he wants to partner with young developers and help build a video game industry on the Prairies.

“I think that the most important thing right now is to mentor people to develop those skills so that we can have a pool of talent,” Hutchence said. “They’re going to start their own companies, they’re going to start pitching their own small projects, and eventually we build up from that and grow and grow and grow.”

So far, Hutchence has been focusing on events, talks and showcases. But now he’s finding people to work with on actual games. Samantha Ramsay, 32, did the character art for a multiplayer fighting game he’s provisionally calling Project Punchy.

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The graphics hearken back to the earliest days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, probably the best known of the early consoles released in the 1980s.

Ramsay said that’s precisely her style.

“It’s just nostalgic,” she said. “They took the limitations, and they made the best of it... It’s a really cool art style that is similar to painting in my mind.”

She compares the sizable pixels to the broad brush strokes in some impressionist works. She said she’s long wanted to turn some of her artistic ideas into video games — but soon found out it was too much work to manage alone.

Ramsay doesn’t have to move away from Regina to partner with other developers. She finds them on Twitter. She said there’s now no need to live in a tech hub to plug into the industry.

“You could do it from anywhere, as long as you’ve got the right tools,” Ramsay said.

Hutchence said anyone with an internet connection can now be “an equal partner in the industry.” Online distribution channels have changed the development game. The option of selling on websites like Steam has broken down barriers that once forced developers to move if they wanted a job.

“If you go back 20 years, when I was really trying to get into the industry as a youth, virtually all computer games were shipped on CDS in boxes,” he said. “They were all sold through retail spaces... To be a game developer, you had to worry about distribution and manufacturing, and logistics and all that.

“So Regina had no way to compete in that market.”

Eichhorst agrees times have changed. He and his business partner, Michael Berger, both work from home. He said Regina has everything he needs in terms of skills and people.

What’s missing is money. “There’s no big game company here that you can apply to. It’s a lot of people doing it on their own,” Eichhorst said. “It takes a long time to do that. And you have to have the funding to survive.”

Hutchence said he’s been paying out of pocket for his efforts.

He said the only government grant program for game development is through Saskinteractive. It’s currently on hiatus.

Hutchence thinks the province risks missing out on more than video games if it moves too slowly. He sees the sector as a bridge to the future, with links to artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and who knows what else.

“Building a video game industry is how we’re going to build the tech sector,” he said. “It’s the easiest way to get kids interested in tech skills.

“If they want to learn to program, it’s probably because they want to make video games.”