An Ottawa-based game development company has created a game for mobile phones called Bytown Skate and Brawl, which challenges players to race down sections of the Rideau Canal past notable Ottawa landmarks.
The company, Jelly Smeared Games Inc., is one of several indie game development studios to emerge in Ottawa over the last 10 years, transforming the city’s gaming industry with their unique mobile content.
Ottawa residents are enamored with Bytown Skate and Brawl’s familiar setting, according to one of its two developers, Ken Hughes.
“This is obviously a novelty for players in Ottawa, which totally blindsided us,” says Hughes.
He explained that Bytown Skate and Brawl is quickly on its way to becoming his company’s highest rated and most downloaded game on the App Store.
The game is styled to look and play like an ’80s-era video game. Players can choose to skate through four different sections of the Rideau Canal – the Glebe, Centretown, Sandy Hill, or Downtown – in a single player time trial or a two-player race. During their skate, players pass familiar places along the canal.
The object of the game is to skate through a section of the canal as quickly as possible. Players have to avoid moguls, children, and other obstacles, and can punch their opponent to slow them down.
Sean MacPhedran, the director of creative strategy at Fuel Youth – a major web and game development company in Ottawa – says Bytown Skate and Brawl is an excellent example of the kind of Canadian content independent game studios are able to create.
“There’s so much international goodwill and interest in Canada,” says MacPhedran. “When we’re competing with American game developers on the indie scene, it’s interesting for us to do things that are more Canadian.”
Larger game development companies typically don’t create games with this kind of niche appeal, and instead develop products that will have a broader geographic appeal and potential customer base.
“When a large game developer in Ottawa for example, puts a game up on the App Store, or Google Play, or the Windows phone store, they can easily make it so people in Brazil, people in Germany can download and play the game and they can make money from it,” MacPhedran explains. “And so I think there’s a desire to make things as internationally appealing as possible.”
Ken Hughes and Bytown Skate and Brawl’s other creator Adrian Neville are graduates of Algonquin College’s game development program. They founded Jelly Smeared Games with several other Algonquin graduates.
“We formed our company as a way to build up our portfolios and to get a little bit of experience game developing so that we would be more desirable to prospective employers,” says Hughes. “If we make some money or some funding along the way, then that’s good too.”
Scott Simpson, CEO and co-founder of Ottawa game development company bitHeads, says this is a route that many Ottawa graduates in this field have to take.
“We still don’t have enough jobs to take all the graduates from Algonquin and other places,” says Simpson. “The universities and colleges are putting out really excellent candidates. They just have to see a lot of them go to Montreal or Toronto, or they’ll start up their own studios here.”
Ottawa is what Simpson calls a “tertiary” gaming market. This means the city has three or four large game development companies, and lots of smaller indie studios producing content for mobile devices. The mobile platform is most popular with indie studios as it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to make mobile games available to the public.
In today’s gaming market, Bytown Skate and Brawl is a throwback to the video games of old. However, its simplicity isn’t a bad thing, says MacPhedran.
“When you’re not working with really high-end graphics, you have to pay more attention to whether or not the experience is fun. When you get these new console games, there’s so much attention paid to what it looks like, and maybe not as much attention paid to whether it’s even fun.”