Gamers and geeks meet at first ever animation conference

Pioneers in the gaming world meet to inspire students at the Indus Valley school of Art and Architecture.

KARACHI: The country’s first-ever gaming and animation conference was held on Thursday at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture with the organisers miraculously managing to persuade the giants of the Pakistani industry to attend.

Pioneers such as Trango, TinTash, Mindstorm studios, Sharpimage and Folio3 showed up to assure the pleasantly surprised students that there was an indigenous gaming industry that would be more than happy to hire them when they graduated.

All of these companies have been successfully making games and designing animation for them in Pakistan for quite a while now. The oldest of these companies was established in 1994. Strangely, though, the students who were interested in taking art development and related work for electric gaming had absolutely no idea that they existed. The students had all planned to apply to international gaming houses where they would be able to design concept art, character and other details for games.

“Our sole purpose here is to corrupt a few young minds,” said the managing director of Pakistan Software Export Board, Zia Imran, who, along with Pakistan Software Houses Association’s Jehan Ara, was responsible for the event taking place. The idea for the conference came to Imran mere weeks ago, when he was meeting a faculty member at Indus Valley. He was optimistic about finally being able to put the game developers and future animators of Pakistan in one room. “If you want to change the world, we are throwing a party. That party starts today,” he said.

For their part, the gaming studio heads explained that they did not even know that at Indus there was a fresh crop of graduates who would be perfect for their studios. One of the studios mentioned that they had been so desperate for good artists that they had actually opened an office in the eastern European state of Bulgaria, just to find talent.

According to Trango Interactive COO Shahryar Hyderi, his company’s claim to fame is the brilliant ‘Shera Jutt’ which they were never able to release due to funding problems. Shera Jutt is a third-person action game that was built as a genre pastiche of the Punjabi movies, in the same vein as Maula Jutt. Hyderi, who seemed as if he had never quite gotten over the unpublished game, mentioned that he had managed to get 10 soundtracks from famous Pakistani artists to accompany it as well.

CEO of Mindstorm studios Babar Ahmed explained to the audience that game development could loosely be divided into three categories: mobile phone game development, online social network games development, and computer/console game development. Unfortunately, Pakistan does not have enough money to develop large scale computer and console games, but because developing mobile and online games takes relatively less time and money, we could go compete with larger international companies.

Some guests took the opportunity to show off their work as some students hoped that they might actually end up working with a company that made cool games in Pakistan. One game on display was the cleverly named ‘Saving Private Lion’ whose artwork was designed by an Indus graduate.

For anyone who missed the event, another get-together is in the offiing so that game designers and students can interact.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2011.