DemoCampHamilton6 Recap: Game on!

DemoCampHamilton6 took place last Tuesday March 20th in the TwelvEighty Pub at McMaster University. A packed house of over 200 students, developers, entrepreneurs, designers and investors came out for an exciting evening where the local gaming industry took center stage.

Keynote speaker Joel Auge (@joelauge), the CEO and co-founder of HitGrab, discussed techniques for building a great product and a great startup. In addition to discussing the lean startup methodology, Joel focused on the importance of measurement and he encouraged us to “Build. Measure. Learn. Repeat.”. Joel encouraged McMaster students to consider staying in Hamilton, and he expressed an interest in doing future game development himself in the city.

The first demo was by done by Linda Mitton of indieoption (@indieoption), who showed us their networking hub designed for independent filmmakers to find the resources (cast, crew, locations, props, etc.) necessary to develop their project. Snakehead Games (@snakeheadgames), who recently located to James Street North in downtown Hamilton, demoed their latest project, a cool iOS word-based puzzle game. Next up was McMaster student Alex Alywin (@alexalywin) to demo Campus Social, a web service and mobile app that helps student clubs promote events and manage their online presence.

After a short break DemoCampHamilton regular FluidMedia demoed a developer-level R&D tracking service. Rich Halliday of Green Pixel (@GreenPixelDev) demoed BlockHopper (available on the App Store), a 2D platformer where the user has to place blocks on the screen to navigate towards an end goal (the blocks themselves having different behaviours depending on the type). Last up was Steve Veerman (@veerman) who demoed Social Hamilton (tentative name), a web app which aggregates social media information from ‘places’ (businesses, restaurants, schools, etc) across Hamilton and allows a user to quickly find events and updates in the city.