Well it has been a year since our win with Cloud 9. We thought it would be nice to see what this year’s turn out was like so Rocco and I made an appearance. I have to say there was a lot variety when it came to this year’s games. We had:

• Stranded, top down survival action game
• Morvennan, a zombie strategy game
• Scrapped, a puzzle platformer
• Slipstream, a networked multiplayer racer

There was many more excellent games on show. The public were invited to come from 4pm, so we arrived just after their presentations. The layout was a little different to last year. They moved all the games into an auditorium at the Edge, which by the way is a terrific multimedia initative that supports all displicines of the arts, including games! This auditorium was where all the presentations were held, complete with lecturn, stage, projector and bright lights. Our presentations last year were done at our tables as industry leaders and QUT staff came by. Last year felt like trade show and this year it was more front and centre for each group. Both approaches would be beneficial, because we as Indies need to nail is the ability to convey our ideas in short concise ways.

After 4pm, we listened to a great talk from Dr Jeff Brand from Bond University. He is author of the Digital Australia and Digital New Zealand reports that look into yearly demographic shift of games and digital media consumption amongst the population. He gave us all a nice pep talk into the state of the game industry here in Australia. Despite the layoffs and studio closures in the last few years he reminded us that the indie scene is growing and getting ready to explode. He explained about the low cost of entry into indie games development. Finally he reminded us that while AAA development may be the goal of many of us the industry is changing we have the potential to be successful on our terms. To me it hammered home the parallels with the films industry, particularly with the booming exposure of web series on the internet.

Finally we came to the awards. The first award was the Most Commercially Viable game from Halfbrick; as the winners of last year’s award we were very keen to see who won. The award was given to Awien Ambush, a gweat… I mean great little tower defence/action side scroller. It is a very polished looking game and was noted in how it fits with Halfbrick style of game development. Congrats guys! Although Rocco and I were a little annoyed that the Disgruntled Spider guys got a Fruit Ninja Sensei plushie for their win and we didn’t. We may have to take it up with the Halfbrick guys themselves, Fruit Ninja Kinect-off I say!

Team Rock IT won the QUT Staff award for their game Manastorm, an amazing multiplayer FPS with manly bearded wizards and hyperbeams of death. Rocco and I participated in their great tournament last week. Check out here for a short post about it.

Well that is another year down for QUT’s Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment final projects. I plan to make this a yearly event to go down to check out the quality of games that we can make as students. Hopefully next year I will be there with some more industry credentials under my belt, it will be that or I will fill that waist line out with the yummy complimentary food and drinks they supply.