Drifter creator part of strong N.L. presence at videogame conference
Colin Walsh kickstarted his videogame project, and the St. John’s developer is helping to spread the word to other aspiring game producers.
Walsh — the man behind Celsius Game Studios, which is developing the space-trading game Drifter — was part of the Newfoundland and Labrador contingent this past week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, an annual gathering of nearly 20,000 representatives from the videogame industry.
It was Walsh’s third time at the conference — but this year, he was one of the speakers, as part of a panel discussing how developers can make use of Kickstarter, a website that allows people to invest in a variety of projects to help them get off the ground.
“I’ve been going because it’s kind of a focal point for the videogame industry,” said Walsh on the phone from California.
“Because we’re on the East Coast and the hubs of the game industry in Canada are Vancouver and Toronto and Montreal, and here on the West Coast San Francisco, this is the place to be once a year to see everyone in the industry touch base with other developers, to learn new things. There’s all sorts of exciting opportunities.”
Walsh views the conference as an educational opportunity, he said, to attend talks on subjects he’s not as familiar with — including art and artificial intelligence.
And this year, he’s sharing his knowledge on something he’s become very familiar with: Kickstarter.
Walsh used the website hoping to draw $50,000 in funding to develop “Drifter” — he raised $81,000. The game is currently in a testing stage, and Walsh hopes to release it this summer.
“Kickstarter, it’s been around for a few years, but it really became a big thing in the games industry when Double Fine Adventure launched. It launched around the time of GDC last year,” he said. “In the past year, things have gotten super big. At the time it was the biggest project that Kickstarter had ever done, briefly. It was the fastest $1 million,” Walsh said.
That video game project eventually garnered more than $3.3 million in pledges.
“That got the ball rolling, so I launched shortly after theirs, within a month or two. That was good, in a way. They brought a lot of people who never used Kickstarter before, so there were a lot of Kickstarter users who love video games. That was buoying other game projects.”
Walsh isn’t the only Newfoundland presence at the conference — representatives from Best Boy, Other Ocean Interactive, Unified Softworx and the College of the North Atlantic’s videogame design program all took in the weeklong conference. The industry in the province is growing, said Walsh.
“We’ve all been trying to make efforts to make Newfoundland a place where game companies could come and grow and establish themselves,” he said.
“Not to knock myself or the other people who are involved in the industry, but I’d say it’s almost embryonic, with what the goals are of trying to make it a place where we can establish the games industry, Newfoundland as a place where people could open a studio and have the support. So we’re the start, and it’s starting to grow. I’m getting the feeling that it’ll take off soon.”