Game jammin’ for the future

COMPETITION: Designers pitted against each other

As competitions go, it didn’t look like much.

Packed together before rows of folding tables and hunched over their keyboards, a dozen young men and women worked feverishly to a rapidly approaching deadline Saturday afternoon. They were aiming to build a video game in less than eight hours.

For Brock University professor Jason Hawreliak, the challenge of Niagara’s first “game jam” is more than just fun and games. It is helping build part of Niagara’s future.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is there is a great deal of talent in Niagara, people who are looking at video games as a career,” Hawreliak said.

“You don’t need to go to Toronto or Montreal. The talent is right here. There are many people who are studying this in school. For a long time, we had a major video game company in St. Catharines (the now defunct Silicon Knights) and several smaller companies spun off out of that.”

Hawreliak, a professor in the digital humanities department at Brock, set up the day-long competition at the Generator at One for students and graduates of Brock and Niagara College and students at the District School Board of Niagara, as a way to help them use, develop and show off their skills.

The premise is simple: competitors are given a theme to base a game upon, and have to come as close to building a working prototype as possible in about eight hours.

Hawreliak said a full, top of the line video game can take as long if not longer to produce than a Hollywood movie.

So the goal of the game jam is not to create something polished and ready for market, but to demonstrate the skills and creativity it takes to get there.

“They are not going to produce something finished. Usually by the end, it’s still buggy and there are lot of things to fix,” Hawreliak said. “But it is seeing what they can do in that short a time frame. Some game jams are as short as three hours.”

The compressed time frame forced the designers and their teams — which included noncomputer technical roles such as musicians and writers — to become as creative as possible.

“Companies aren’t really looking for degrees alone, they are looking for skills and real experience. So the participants are able to put this on their resumes, which will help them a lot,” he said.

The game jam winner was David Milot of St. Catharines, a recent graduate of Brock’s computer science program. Hawreliak said Milot’s winning entry was a mobile phone game called Arrteroids, where players defended their tower by shooting down incoming asteroids.