Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Mobile gaming is a growing industry in T&T and young developers are rising to the challenge.

One company of young entrepenurs, Toolkit Developers (TKD), took the opportunity presented by the Animae Caribe (AC) Animation and Digital Media Festival to release a local mobile game application called Project Gordo I.

TKD President, Brian Perry said the game is a version of Pong which the group put together after they graduated from University. It has been described by a reviewer as a combination of Missile Command, Asteroids, Breakout and Pong rolled into one. “It has what we call trolls, and on the second level it has plateaus and voids and as you progress to other levels it gets more difficult. It’s set in space simply because Gordo is the name of one of the first monkeys to ever actually go into space and there are slight easter eggs, if people decide to do some research, that give hints to Gordo’s actual story. We would like to see if it’s the type of game the local market likes and if they do enjoy it, we would definitely love to do another variation with more of a local twist, maybe like a doubles vendor trying to catch barra or something.”
Perry said the game was made using a pre-built game engine called Unity that does both 2D and 3D based game design. “All the members of the design team are locally based. There are seven of us in TKD and we have our own designers and programmers.”
“At the end of next month, what we would like is to get some sponsors on board to help Toolkit Developers out, to implement some sort of product placement. We want users to play the game and whoever gets the highest score or progresses the furthest in the game, they are able to get an award or we can send them something, etc. We’ve gotten definite positive results from students who’ve played the game.”
Perry said TKD is always open to the idea of collaboration and they are merging with local company ICE (Interactive Creative Development) which focuses on creative entertainment, animations and game development. He said they also offered the opportunity to student developers to showcase their games at the Festival as well as to work with the company in the future.
“The animation industry needs to be built up a bit more. Events like Animae Caribe are perfect for this purpose and I believe we should have more conventions like this throughout the year, simply because it allows users to look at the interesting creations. We were showing our games and students came up and said that they build games as well and would we like to check them out? We were able to give them advice and they could also give us tips as developers. I personally like to believe as game developers, as animators, as content creators, just like a YouTuber, or someone who creates blogs, etc., we have to huddle together and make sure the industry develops into something good.”
The game is currently only available on the Android Platform and can be found in the Google Play Store.