Tomorrow closes out the 26th annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, USA (March 5-9, 2012) and mega huge thanks to the support of ProChile (The Trade Commission of Chile) and Video Games Chile (The Chilean Game Developers Association), 5 Chilean member companies had the opportunity to showcase the game developers and design talent out of Chile.
With the recent acquisition of Atakama Labs by DeNA out of Japan, we know that a lot of curious folks couldn’t help but check out what’s coming next out of this small but dynamic South American innovation market.
The Game Developers Conference® (GDC) is the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event. The conference commemorated its 25th edition in 2011, making it also the longest-running event of its kind.
What’s Video Games Chile?
The Chilean Video Games Developers Association (VG Chile), is a nonprofit organization that aims to help the growth of locals enterprises by serving as a common link between them, the government, the universities, the media and other organizations.
Founding companies of The Chilean Game Developers Association are: ACE Team, AmnesiaGames, Atakama Labs (acquired by DeNA Japan), Gamers Making Games, Games For Food, Powermedia, Jobbitgames and WanakoGames (Acquired by Vivendi Game’s Sierra Entertainment).
In addition to unbelievable networking and amazing presentations and workshops, The Game Developer’s Conference is a chance for us smaller independent game houses to receive major visibility from investors, publishers and distributors. We are all really thankful for the opportunity to be here and represent Chile. – Daniel Winkler, Secretary, VGA Chile.
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Our Chilean Game Developers at GDC 2012!!
IguanaBee
IguanaBee has tackled many different technologies and originally got their start in the Adver Gaming space, but they are currently focusing on innovating in mobile platforms, localizing games for the Chinese market, creating novel IPs and maintaining communities of players.
The 2 major products they will be offering are:
1) A geolocation social game for mobile devices.
2) A 3D audio-only set of games that can be played by anyone including blind people.
Their geolocation project is a free-to-play social game for mobile platforms. It will help different stores to reach consumers in a fun and engaging way. It will also feature a freemium model where players will be able to buy in-game items. Their geolocation game should be available worldwide for both iOS and Android. They are currently looking for ways and partners to help promote it.
Amnesia Games
Amnesia Games is one of the leading game developers out of Latin America. They develop casual mobile games and are also the design studio behind the incredibly popular Ninja Joe app in Chile. Last year after just a few months on the market, the game had already reached one million downloads of its free version.
The founder and CEO of Amnesia Games, Alejandro Woywood is the visionary behind the “Video game developers meeting” that took place on December 15th 2009 at Engineering UC (Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile) and organized by the UC “Video games creation” course’s staff and AmnesiaGames. This served as the impetus and foundation for the launch of The Video Game Developer’s Association which was formalized April 26, 2010.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6aROdgfjmc[/youtube]
Brainstormers
Brainstormers is an independent Video Game & Board Game Developer located in Santiago, Chile. They specialize in game design, art and Original License Development. They recently celebrated a milestone with a successful Kickstarter Campaign, where they managed to raise sufficient funding to launch a board game they recently designed, Puzzle Me.
Puzzle Me! was designed by Pablo Gorigoitía who is also one of Brainstormers’ co-founders and currently serves as President of VG Chile (Video Game Designers of Chile).
ePig Games
The award winning ePig games studio was the first company in Chile to develop an HTML5 game.
They are designing primarily for the smartphone and rapidly growing tablet market which is predicted to increase from 16.2 million sales in 2012 to 147.2 million by 2015.
Nicolás Palacios, ePig Games CEO, along with his co-founders Andres Cortes and Diego Palacios (who is also his brother) recently celebrated a huge milestone as their ePig games series surpassed 1,000,000 downloads.
They currently have 8 games available in the apps store – ePig Surf, ePig Dive, ePig Dash, e-Pig Rope, ePig Adventure, ePigMindControl, ePigPrediction and their newest release is ePig Monster Smasher.
Games For Food
Games For Food was founded in 2009 by Rolando Abarca and Felipe Bascuñán. Games For Food is a game design studio focused on developing fun, smart, casual games for mobile platforms and most recently for the web with a mighty team committed to deliver the best games they can, working with passion and concentrating on the user’s experience.
In April of 2011 Rolando stepped down as CEO of Games For Food to join Zynga, so Felipe took the wheel and became the CEO and Juan Rodríguez-Covili, whom they both met during the Game Developers Conference 2011, assumed the technical leadership as the CTO, starting a new stage for Games For Food.
During this second stage, Games For Food has been growing as a company (currently 12 employees), bringing talented and smart people to be part of their development team, accumulating experience and knowledge due to their participation in the development of several outsourcing projects using the ngCore/Mobage platform and also internal projects using cocos2d-x and HTML5 + WebGL technologies. Recently, besides working on outsourced projects, Games For Food has been developing original ideas and game concepts in order to begin publishing their own IP.
Clumsy Pirates launch
At the Games Developer Conference 2012 they released their Clumsy Pirates game.
The trailer follows:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Z6Zw007oI[/youtube]
Featured Image Credits: esosnik
