Sheridan students win chance to showcase video game at E3

It’s one of the biggest video game trade shows in the world, and this year, a group of Sheridan College students have won the chance to showcase their game at E3.

Benjamin Scott, Joshua Cappelli, Shae Humphries, Brendan Muir, Zack Wolfe and Cody Romphf decided to submit their game Arrow Heads to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESA) student video game competition, after coming in first at Level Up – a student gaming showcase at the Design Exchange in Toronto.

“We got to show it at Level Up and we won Level Up, which blew us all away. And now we won ESA and I don’t even think the team knows how to react to anymore,” Romphf said with a chuckle.

“We found out a couple weeks ago but we couldn’t say anything just while the ESA did their official press release. So, it’s been hard to sit on it. Hiding it from friends and family, it’s been hard.

Arrow Heads is a zany, fast paced, battle royale archery game where you and your friends are birds with some amazing skills with a bow and arrow.

The six students, who are making the game under the self-created studio OddBird Studio, are all in their second year of game design at Sheridan.

Romphf said the group had to find a way to juggle their passion to create the game with full course loads.

“It was just a big balancing project, trying to get everything done on weekends, on nights, whenever we could fit the time in,” he explained.

Humphries, who is the game’s art director, said he wanted to make a game with a distinctive esthetic and not have Arrow Heads fall into the all too common pixel or “low poly” look.

“We tried to stray away from that because it’s become so oversaturated,” Humphries explained. “We wanted to do something different that would actually stand out from the average thing you might see from a student game or a small indie game.”

He said he was inspired by shows like Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Stevie because of their distinctive cartoon styles.

Getting to go to E3, which takes place every June at the Los Angeles Convention Cenre, is a dream come true, according to Romphf.

“We read up about the ESA student competition – We even said, ‘This would be a dream come true,’ having no intention or expectation of actually getting to go. And now it’s happening. It’s pretty surreal,” he said.

The team hopes that the exposure they will get at E3 can bring their game to consoles.

“I think a lot of us, it’s so much up in the air we don’t know what’s possible,” said Romphf. “That’s definitely what we’re striving for but it’s our first game … Success would be, obviously, wonderful but just to get that game to release … that’s definitely our biggest goal.”