Session:Emerging Artist Showcase

Derek Gallant is a game programming student at Humber College who has been captivated by game development for over a decade. He has a passion for indie games, and is currently putting the finishing touches on Ballin, a 2D physics game.

Session:Finding My Way Into Games (As a Graphic Designer)

Cory Schmitz is a graphic designer from Seattle WA, temporarily living in Toronto to work on a video game. In the year after publishing video game culture magazines EXP and The Controller, he has done design projects for Sworcery, Uncharted 3, Anamanaguchi, Joystiq, and more.

Sessions: Emerging Artist Showcase

Cale Bradbury is a fountain of game design ideas. He’s been making a prolific amount of small game “thingys” over the last 4 years and is now pushing out of his comfort zone with his current title.

The Gamercamp app, powered by Guidebook, is now available and is the best and easiest way to organize your time at the festival. Check out all our speaker bios, sessions, activities, and even make your own schedule!

Just head to m.guidebookapp.com and you’ll find our event listed on the home page. If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device, you can download the Guidebook app off the Apple and Android app stores and search for Gamercamp—one advantage is that the app saves the information locally, so even if you lose connectivity, you still have that goodness available. You can also get notifications for upcoming sessions so you won’t miss a thing, even if you’re in the middle of an epic game!

Gesundheit! started out as freeware for the PC way back in 2007 (and even made now-IGF Chairperson Brandon Boyer’s top 5 list) but found its stride when it was released for Apple’s iOS devices this year. Filled with joyful art, an adorable soundtrack, and unique stealth gameplay, the puzzle game racked up positive reviews and was named an essential game to own by IGN.

While a lot of attention is given to the game’s signature mucus-throwing mechanic (an ode to his girlfriend, funny enough—creator Matt Hammill shared the whole story with our Jaime Woo over at Torontoist), the best part of Gesundheit! is the beautiful art. If you haven’t seen the trailer for the game, do yourself a favour and check it out now. There’s a sense of an old National Film Board cartoon becoming interactive in the way that the illustrations are filled with life and contain a certain joie de vivre. It’s difficult to look at Hammill’s work without feeling warmth.

Matt has written about the artwork, noting: “In Gesundheit!, I was experimenting with a naive, children’s book-inspired hand-drawn aesthetic to go along with the game’s odd story about an allergic pig battling monsters with edible snot. I wanted to see how the quirks and imperfections of rough hand-made art could be brought into video games, which by nature lend themselves to more technical art methods.”

He will be sharing his perspective on art and its role in games on Saturday afternoon at George Brown College. He’ll be sharing the importance of art and how it can convey the message of the game when sometimes art can be relegated to a secondary, background role. Before his talk, be sure to grab Gesundheit! off the App Store.

We guarantee it’ll charm you!

Get your Sunday going right with the return of our 8-Bit Cereal Breakfast! We had so much fun with the breakfast last year, we had to bring it back.

Come decked out in your finest pajamas, settle down to all your favorite cereals, and then add some classic cartoons projected onto a big screen—it’ll be like a little childhood time machine. Help us figure out what cereals to provide by heading over to Facebook and answering our poll! (While you’re there, make sure to like us. ) Don’t be afraid of putting in weird choices—we can’t guarantee every cereal, but we sure will try!

We’ll have an assortment of milks for our friends who don’t drink dairy, such as soy and almond milk. To keep waste down, we’re going BYOBS (Bring Your Own Bowl and Spoon) but if you don’t have one we can provide biodegradable ones for $0.25. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have some Pinky and the Brain to watch and Cap’n Crunch to munch on!

This post would have gone up a lot sooner if we weren’t busy playing Get Set’s Mega Jump. In the game, you play as an adorable red monster named Redford who soars through the air, gaining speed by collecting coins—miss too many coins or hit an obstacle and your flight ends, with Redford spiralling towards the ground.

Mega Jump‘s accessibility is an obvious reason why the arcade-style game is so popular (with over 22 million downloads to date) and, best of all, the game is free to play! (Click here for Apple and here for Android!)

Get Set is a Gamercamp veteran, but something new is that we are so proud to be sponsored by the studio this year! There’s no doubt that Get Set is a true hometown success and, for us, watching it grow with the success of Mega Jump has been inspiring. (Mega Jump was even briefly featured in an Apple keynote!) Get Set will have a room at George Brown College on Saturday and Sunday where you can chat with the developers, play Mega Jump, and there may even be some sneak previews involved.

Get Set will have two representatives speaking at Gamercamp this year! Rob Segal will be spreading awareness of the Toronto Video Game Jam on Friday, a must-attend event for any developer in the city, of which he is a co-organizer. And, Matt Coombe will be talking on Sunday about the success of Mega Jump and the lessons the studio has learned for its follow-up game Mega Run.

Mega Jump acts as a perfect case study for iteration and learning from what your players want: the game has been significantly bulked up since its initial version. When the game started, it didn’t have progressive levels and only featured Redford.

Now, the game has whole worlds and a cast of creatures, along with a variety of power-ups and items, such as a star that acts as an extra life, allowing you to continue your progress on a stage after messing up. You don’t wanna know how many times we’ve almost reached the end of a stage only to mess up and then be grateful for that star!

Alright, enough words. Back to beating the ninth stage!

Saturday afternoon at Gamercamp will feature our Grilled Cheese Factory – a lunchtime event where attendees will be able to make their own grilled cheese sandwiches from a variety of toppings. For the last week there has been much debate as to what constitutes a grilled cheese topping and what toppings are best.

Some consider ‘grilled cheese’ literally (ie. a slice of cheese between grilled slices of toast), resulting in a specific range of toppings like sriracha. Others consider it a spiritual representation of the legendary childhood lunchtime food and are more liberal with toppings like nutella and bananas.

The debate is poised to rage on for generations to come but you can weigh in by voting for your favorite toppings on our Gamercamp Facebook page (scroll down to Thursday, Nov 10) or, better yet, get your ticket for Gamercamp and vote with your mouth!

Game players have long known the power of fun and play as a motivating force. But recently the idea of games for change has been gaining momentum and being used by scientists to solve real-world problems. There’s no better example than the game FoldIt, whose lead designer Seth Cooper, a researcher at the University of Washington and Creative Director for the Center for Game Science, is the Gamercamp Lv3 keynote speaker.

Proteins are involved in almost all of our bodily processes, from breaking down sugar into energy to transporting oxygen through the blood. They also govern how disease-causing, foreign cells like E.Coli, Streptococcus, and HIV function. Understanding the shape of these proteins within cells is key, which is where FoldIt comes in.

FoldIt is a puzzle game that presents players with an unfolded protein strand and asks them to fold it. Folding is important because, while scientists can infer what’s called the primary structure of a protein (i.e. the type and sequence of amino acids that comprise it), it is the elusive 3D shape that guides how a protein interacts with its environment. (Think space station and docking bays.)

The unfolded protein you see when you play FoldIt is the primary sequence. You score points based on the energy of the bonds you create as you “fold it” together. Since a protein is most stable (and likely) shape is when the bonds are strongest, the higher your score the more likely you’ve found the protein’s true shape. How’s that for motivation to top the leaderboards!

FoldIt players most famously helped decipher (in 10 days) the structure of the AIDS-causing virus M-PMV that had stumped researchers for nearly 15 years. You can find out more about this incredible game and how games can affect change when Seth Cooper takes the stage for our lead-off keynote Friday, November 25, 2011.

To see Seth’s and other great speakers talk, buy your Full Festival or One-Day Pass here. See you there!

FoldIt—Seth Cooper, presenting the keynote presentation “Using Games To Solve Difficult Real-World Problems” on Friday morning.

Mega Jump—Rob Segal and Matt Coombe, presenting the Get Set Room on Saturday afternoon and Sunday at George Brown College and “Sticking The Landing—Strategies On Shepherding The Next Big Project” on Sunday afternoon.

Friendship in 4 Colours—Damian Sommer, presenting “I MAEK GAMES AND SO CAN YOU!” on Sunday afternoon.