Every two months a new group of students emerges from the bowels of Vancouver Film School’s Video Game Design Program. They are battered and weary but, as their final effort, must pitch and play their treasured final projects for an audience comprised of industry employees. This night can make or break it for young designers in the early phases of their careers. It’s about getting yourself noticed: making your mark before the next graduating class—only two months behind you—is also on the market. It’s tough, but for some VFS graduates, myself included, a successful “Pitch and Play” night can mean being picked up by a company immediately and bypassing the job hunt completely.

The end of May saw the 28^th round of students from the Game Design Campus finish their games and ready their teams to present. At VFS, we call them the GD28s—I was a GD27—so you get the picture. I feel close to these teams; they’re living through a life-changing experience that changed my life 180 degrees. & just a couple of months ago, in fact. So I was curious about them, and decided to tag along to the GD28’s Pitch and Play in order to see what a difference two months makes.

During the Video Game Design program, students pursue a couple of different “streams,” which can include level design, programming, art and narrative/writing. Most students try and combine their streams according to what they want eventually to do: someone who wants to build environments would get the most use out of level design and art. The GD28s split themselves between the streams evenly, which gave the class as a whole a balanced talent set. So, when it came to splitting into teams for their final projects, the teams themselves were also balanced. This is important: imagine if you had to create a game with three artists and no programmer. It would be very difficult, but not impossible. At VFS all student teams are recommended to be between three and five members, most teams try and make themselves at least four members strong to try and give themselves as much digital muscle power as possible.

As industry night began, the audience filtered inside, greeting old acquaintances along the way and finding their seats. Sean Smiley, the announcer and “Presentation Skills” teacher at VFS, took the stage and introduced the GD28s and their first team, the students behind Demonella. It was time to see what each team had been laboring over these last months and to celebrate the challenges they’d overcome—and Demonella’s team had certainly faced a unique problem: they were the only team in the class with only three people.

Even so, Demonella’s talented trifecta rendered a fourth person unnecessary: their game has such unique style of art and such an interesting set of enemies (in the form of exploding teddy bears that chase the player about the stage after coming out of a “Build-a-Bear” machine) that nothing felt lacking in execution or design.

The second game, Big Jet, was one of the great unknowns for me. During my time in production, they sat all the way across the production floor from me, and this was the first time I’d ever had a really good look at their game. In Big Jet the player is a robot who creates tornados to hurl objects from the environment around him at incoming enemies. Big Jet brings with it a unique soundtrack, recorded by the team themselves, along with collaborators from the other campuses.

The best part about being indie is that you get to do whatever you want and no one can tell you otherwise. In the world of games for every game that gets completed there are a hundred that get left on the cutting room floor or that get canceled partway through production. The third game presented, Bullet Rider is one of those games where the concept is probably too absurd to have ever gotten a green light by the likes of EA, but in traditional indie spirit Bulletrider’s team didn’t let it stop them: in a world where the inside of every gun is an office building, bullets are ridden and guided to their targets by morbidly obese middle aged men with mad log rolling skills. Bulletrider, is reminiscent of retro arcade games and the recent fad of run-forevers on mobile devices.

Coming into the home stretch was the second five-person team, presenting their technically impressive game, Chromeras. For any lover of Mario Kart’s “battle mode” this is a game for you. Chromeras is a four-player game that allows players to compete with their friends in four different game modes. As with Bullet Rider being indie is all about doing things that other people haven’t: Chromeras took a big gamble by trying to be the first networked multiplayer game to come out of VFS. Senior technical instructor and self-proclaimed supreme overlord Peter Walsh had this to say among other things, “A great night with some really impressive games—including our first fully networked game with Chromeras—this is definitely the team to watch in future. Also incredibly impressive was The Horroring.”

Indeed. The last game of the night was certainly not a borroring, a snorroring or The Horror Ring (thanks EGM), but The Horroring: a unique concept with an excellent execution. My first thought upon seeing The Horroring’s large and well-populated world unfold was “I can’t believe one artist did all of this.” This game brought together seamless design and a charming world with just the right amount of musical ambiance to truly captivate the audience. The artist in question, Alejandro Borjas, says he was relieved at the end of the night that everyone’s presentation went off without a hitch, not all of the graduating classes can make this claim.

After the presentation, assorted industry employees, many of whom are alumni, wandered upstairs for a chance to meet students and have a few drinks. Usually, at the end of the night the head of the VFS Game Design Campus, Dave Warfield, kicks everyone out and sends them to a pub, but not this time! Several industry veterans were having such a good time playing Chromeras that poor Dave was shouted down as he tried to empty the development floor of people. According to Harry Scott, the level designer from Chromeras, “Alcohol and multiplayer games don’t always mix.”

I’ve got to say that the most impressive part of the whole night was certainly the art. In every class there are one or two games that shine visually and occasionally one where the team clearly lacked a strong artistic lead or direction. But for the GD28s, all five games were nothing short of gorgeous. One industry veteran, who shall remain nameless, but who has been around since VFS Game Design’s inception, said that he thought this was the strongest class he had ever seen.