Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 recently concluded in San Francisco and showcased amazing number of technologies and one of the Indian studios to be in the middle of this humdrum was DSK Green Ice Games. The studio is back and received a great response to its game Death God University (DGU) at GDC 2015 that was featured at Epic’s booth.
Studio head Alexis Madinier, speaks about the team’s experience to AnimationXpress.com: “The response to DGU at GDC 2015 was very good. Everyone loved the style, the premise and the concept of the game. Epic guys were really amazed and loved the idea and liked what we did with DGU and invited us to the stage and live streamed us again at the Epic booth. Also, because of this we had some very amazing contacts with some interesting people regarding consoles prospects of DGU and this means that DGU might release on some consoles soon.”
Not only did Alexis showcase DGU at GDC 2015, but also got to experience a lot of new exciting things on display at the conference. Sharing his experience, Alexis exults: “Experience at GDC 2015 was amazing; we got to meet a lot of incredible people at the event. One of them was a team from Mixamo. We are using a technology from Mixamo and put a show there but when we met up with folks from the company, they didn’t even know we existed, but once they saw what we were doing, they were excited to work with us and uplifted their technology and showcased our game.”
One of the developments that took the gaming fraternity by storm was Epic making Unreal Engine 4 free for all and launch of Unity engine 5. Sharing his insights on this news he adds: “GDC was surrounded by VR technology. Everybody was showcasing something around VR. NVIDIA, AMD, Valve and a lot of major companies were showcasing VR technologies. There were also a lot of haptic tech which can make the experience all the more immersive. Though VR is not something we can use for DGU, but maybe for the next game.”
He further adds that Epic wants every developer big or small to succeed and create successful games. “They are very keen on helping everybody. Going free for them is really normal. They have a very different approach for development,” informs Alexis. “Five per cent of your revenue is not much if you are making money for the technology that is worth millions of dollars. What Epic showed at the booth and at the show was really high quality and was above CryEngine, one of their competitors and there was also Unity 5 launching and going free on the booth but it is a different approach for the same model.”
Unity is relatively new to the battlefield but has lots to learn in terms of being user friendly, enabling pipeline creation content, which Unreal is doing successfully since 1998.
“I am still happy to use Unreal and more happy that it is free. I now want to see more Indian game development companies use Unreal and push it as we will benefit more as the user input makes Unreal better,” Alixis ends.