Like many average college students, Owen Deery and his friends spent most of their free time trying to finish a video game.
Only they weren’t playing it, they were building it. And with any luck, the game Dino ’Splode will soon be available for download on the Xbox Live Indie Arcade.
The game is a classic side-scroller in the mould of the early Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man games.
It follows Sandwich, the last fireball-shooting dinosaur on the planet, as he fights hordes of cavemen who are trying to capture him.
“We figured you could come up with a good video game if you slam two ideas together. So we figured a dinosaur that exploded might be fun,” said Deery. “When we started developing the game we found out it was actually really fun to play as a side-scroller.”
Deery and four of his classmates from Algonquin College’s game design program,
Wesley Scharf, Gabriel Verdon, Steve Grove, Anthony Bongers, spent most of their free time over the past school year making the game.
“It took up pretty much all of our spare time for seven or eight months,” said Deery.
While they all met in the game development program, the game was an entirely extracurricular affair. The five students were grouped together in the class and found they shared a passion for fun game development. They even named their game studio Section 2, because that’s their section in the class.
Now that’s its complete, the game has been submitted for testing to the Xbox Live Indie Arcade. If it passes that, Section 2 hopes to sell for $3 per download.
