Pitch & Play is an event held every term during which student teams present their final projects to an audience from the game industry. As students currently in the pre-production phase of our final projects, we were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to attend this event and cover the games on show.
Senior Instructor Andrew Laing was the host of the evening, and kept the audience entertained throughout the night with his funny, and somewhat corny, jokes.
The first game of the night was Strange Eden by Wes Bassett, Bernardo de Carvalho, Jason Delesalle and Evan Yates. You play as a woman who is looking for her husband after their ship crash-lands on a mysterious city in the sky. The game mixes fast-paced platforming with the player collecting letters that reveal the fate of the husband and the nature of the city.
Check out Strange Eden and play it by clicking HERE
Next up was Star Struck by Jim Dodge, Pietro Esposti and Darian Mazloomi. Players play as Dr. Box, the mayor of Cardboard city, who uses his best friend (who is also a hallucination) a star, as a weapon to smash up everything in the environment. The goal of the game is to defeat Don Vegano and reclaim the city’s meat shipment.
Check out Starstruck and play it by clicking HERE
The third game to present was all about string and grappling, designed and developed by Jesse Bardell, Peter Ho, Alvin Kwok, Jesse Mark and Alex Young. String Theory is a third-person adventure game, where the player grapples through a soft, fuzzy world, with the objective to stitch the gaps in the environment while avoiding other-worldly voodoo dolls and dinosaurs that wreak havoc on the peaceful land.
Check out String Theory and play it by clicking HERE
Finally, the presentations wrapped up with Sweet Escape, with Raul Alvarez, Trilok Potluri, Tomas Pamiona, Marcus Lembi and Eric Shad Miller, who was playing as the confectionery genius, Dr. Life LeBlanc. Sweet Escape is an isometric puzzle game for the PC where the player controls a crane to move Dr. LeBlanc’s candy creations through a vending machine. It looked like a pretty sweet game to play!
Check out Sweet Escape and play it by clicking HERE
After the presentations wrapped up in the TV Studio, everyone made their way to the second floor to play all of the student games, including the two individual projects that were on the production floor.
The first game that was made in Construct 2 was designed and developed by Zac Christie. Mutamorphis is a 2D platformer where monsters are trying to escape a lab.
Check out Mutamorphis and play it by clicking HERE
The second game was Natalie Tai’s Istoria, an isometric exploration game where players are trying to find the pages of a magical book.
Check out Istoria and play it by clicking HERE
Amidst all of the social-mingling, we were able to catch some remarks from the event’s attendees.
Kristine Tilos of Hothead Games, a graduate of the program, commented on the increase in the quality and the variety of games on display.
The Sweet Escape team’s presentation impressed several attendees including Yggy King (Blackbird Interactive) and Alon Mizrahi (Fathom Interactive) who enjoyed the costumes & acting and considered it the highlight of their evening.
Glen Hamilton, a mentor who advises teams on their design during production, stated that the reason for the quality of the games is the attention to detail and the focus on a delivering a polished game experience.
All in all, the Pitch & Play was a great success for the GD 31s! Congratulations for developing such amazing games!
Maria Lee and Siddhartha Rangaswamy Devaraj are Game Design students at VFS, they are just wrapping up their Pre-production for their final projects.
