On April 3rd, 2013 my team and I had the opportunity to attend the 2013 LevelUP showcase which featured videogames created by students from varying universities and colleges. This meant that the team and I would be showing the game we have been developing since last semester, Luna, to not only students and professors from other schools but to the general public as LevelUP is a free event and open to the public. It was safe to say we were nervous being there, like we didn't belong because our game did not look presentable to us at all. But hey, any excuse the get out of school right? It was cold that morning, I was a little excited to be back in the city after so long, but that did little to cure my nervousness. All teams from our school were scheduled to meet at around 10am at the Design Exchange building in Toronto, the showcase was held to be held on the first and second floors of the building. We got there, helped set up a few things in the room but essentially did nothing for a good long while but then we were instructed to finally set up our games at our designated areas. After completing that task, we did nothing again. The coordinators of the event promised us pizza at noon, we did not get the pizza at noon! We got it at 3pm! By that time we were hungry as all hell and descended on those pizzas like wolves.
Finally, 5pm rolled around and the event became open to the public. By this time I was so bored, and tired that I didn't care how our game looked and was eager to do something to relieve my boredom. A great variety of people drifted into the hall, from students from other schools to little children eager to play some video games. The hall filled up fast and was soon filled with the noise of video games and jostling people. We presented our game to anyone who even remotely seemed interested in our game and we found that the people that seemed to enjoy our game the most were little girls which was both adorably awesome and valuable to our marketing plan.
Whenever there was an opportunity I would wander the hall observing and playing the games from the other schools. I found that most of them used pre-made engines like the Unreal Engine or Unity unlike us who have to build it from scratch. i do not deny the value in learning to make games from scratch but my main gripe comes from the sheer difference in the aesthetic value these engines give teams as it allows them to make their games much more visually appealing despite them having almost the exact same mechanics as ours do. This seemed to draw people towards their games more as oppose to ours. Though there were a few games that truly deserves the attention like this one game who's main character is a shadow (sadly, never got a chance to play that one).
While this was all going on up stairs on the second floor, down on the first floor was where industry professionals were set up where they would present their products to anyone who would listen much like how we were doing up stairs. they were also interested in taking in people's resume's and business cards, especially Big Viking Games (I really wanted that hat). This was another problem I had with the setup of LevelUP because the students were busy focusing on presenting their games upstairs and the public, upon entering the building, went straight upstairs so that the first floor was almost completely empty the whole time. I think that next time both the professional developers and the students should be in the same area so as to maximize the interaction between the students and themselves as well as allow the professionals more exposure to the public.
Overall LevenUP was a great experience and we got some awesome feedback about our game.
Sources
https://www.facebook.com/events/492049624175588/
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