A Rant about Level-Up

A Rant about level up

Level up is yearly event held in Toronto where universities and collages from around Ontario come and show off there games to the public. At the end of the event there are prizes and awards given out. The awards are for generic game awards like best game-play and stuff like that. The awards are voted on by the public but only for some and the others are based on judges that went around undercover.

The turn out for Level up was around 50 teams my groups included. It was neat seeing all the work from different students in the same field as me. One thing I could notice is that almost every one with the exception of UOIT (the university I study at) had made games through existing engines. At UOIT we had to make our games from scratch. For example my groups game was made from openGL, Fmod and windows code only. Where other teams made a game through unity, Cry-engine or unreal engine. In effect, of this there was a noticeable difference between UOIT teams and the other teams where the other teams had to only focus on game-play and maybe assets where UOIT teams had to make everything and did not have enough time in the year to polish every aspect of their games.

When it came time to hand out awards the only games that one were the ones from the teams that used a industrial game engine. I think to make the awards more fair there should have been more categories so that teams that had to make every thing have a chance in competing with engines that make the game for you.

All in all it was a fantastic event and I had a great time. Got a lot of feed back from the public and made changes to better my groups team.