For most students, the approach of winter break means stress over finals. But for those studying video game development at USC, the tension is even greater: If they’re successful at what’s called Demo Day, they could get their game into stores or land a big job.
The end-of-semester event draws representatives from some of the top video game publishers in the country, including Santa Monica’s Activision Blizzard and North Hollywood’s Disney Interactive Media Group. Company reps see student projects from the engineering school’s video game lab, called Game Pipe.
At last week’s Demo Day, six teams showed their games to an audience of more than 100. The student design teams played the games on projection displays, explained their features and talked their way through the action. Industry people and other students asked a few questions.
Game Pipe Director Michael Zyda said the event marks a “checkpoint” in student progress in the yearlong class, but can also lead to internships, jobs or even commercialization of their projects.
In 2008, one team’s game, “The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom,” was published by New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software for PC computers and Xbox Live. After last year’s Demo Day, Creative Artists Agency helped another team sign a contract with Konami, a Japanese publisher, to release puzzle game “Divergent Shift” for Nintendo consoles.
Zyda said this year the games to watch are “Quicksilver,” a beat-’em-up game where characters move through a storyline while fighting, and “Dance Pad,” where players use their fingers to hit colored lights that flash on an iPad.
The “Dance Pad” team plans to release the game on Apple’s app store next year, so success at Demo Day is less of a factor for them. But Teddy Diefenbach, the producer of “Quicksilver,” said Demo Day could help his team’s project get picked up by a publisher.
“We want to get some attention through whatever channels we can,” said Diefenbach, a graduate student in the cinema school’s interactive media program. “We think it’s a sellable game.”
