A workshop was held on Game Designing for Degree students at Arena Chandigarh. Spread over 5 days, it started with familiarization with game genres and game devices/ mediums. From there it went on to familiarize the students with various game designers in the world including the famous Shigeru Miyamoto (designer of mario brothers), Will Wright (designer of simulators games including Simcity) Scott Rogers (designer of PacMan Worlds and God of War), Josh Sawyer (Rollercoaster Tycoon) and Satoshi Tajiri (designer of Pokemon) , Sid Meyer (Civilization, Railroad Tycoon) , Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia), Toru Iwatani (Pacman), Jaakko Iisalo (Angry Birds). Thereafter the students were given game design pipeline and taken through one game design in a children’s park for a fun location. They produced the game in given 4 hours and demostrated the same to others.
Thereafter an a Game Design Project followed, which took 2 days to make. Therein the students had to design a Board based game with a unique strategy. It was not to match any existing game. Some of the final submissions were very creative and showed potential for commercialization.
The Workshop conductee was Vineet Raj Kapoor, himself a Game Industry Specialist. He is presently working on a card game “POW” (Prisoners of War) and is in talks with leading game distributors/ publishers for the release of this game. This game is designed by Vineet and is aimed at 8-15 year old boys. He has plans to bring out a girls version soon thereafter. His studio is also engaged by a UK company in a Joint Venture to publish a 3D Game quite soon. Slated to release in 2012 sometime, it is at various stages of development on Models, Level Design and Programming. Promo videos would be shot in India.