The French Connection
by Jason Della Rocca (April 2003)
Our March chapter meeting was pushed back into early April in order to accomodate the delegation of developers in from Lyon, France. So, the local community was hungry for action, given our last meeting was when Graeme demo'd Doom 3 back in January. Upwards of 200 developers attended this chapter meeting at the Gesù Theatre.
The Alliance NumeriQC and the Entreprise Rhône-Alpes International had organized a trade mission between developers in Lyon (WideScreen Games, Doki Denki, Aspido), and companies in Montreal and Quebec City. Similar to when a bunch of Australian developers came to town, we were more than happy to hear from the French developers and their projects. In particular, it was good to hear that the efforts of LyonGame (Lyon's local game industry trade association) and the cohesiveness of the Lyon game community has enabled developers to weather the recent storms in France...
After the Lyon developers' presentation, we moved on to the "piece-de-resistence", the postmortem of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. Mathieu Ferland, the producer of this award winning game, spoke about the design philosophy of the game, the inspiration behind the story, and listed out the rights and wrongs of the game's production. As is true for many great games, he described the passion and motivation of the team as the driving force behind the overall success of the game.
Once all the presentations were done, we headed into the hall for drinks and socializing.
Big thanks to our sponsors
And, of course, thanks to our volunteers who helped out: Josie St-Amour, David Marcelin and Isabelle Marazzani.
April Gathering Pictorial
...here are just a few shots I took during the April gathering of the Montreal Chapter. (all persons are identified from left to right)
Martial Humblot (Aspido), Olivier Masclef (WideScreen Games), Pierre Carde
(LyonGame) and Philippe Renaudin (Doki Denki) discuss the Lyon game industry,
their studios and how modes of financing and publisher relations are
changing...
Claudia Marcoux (Alliance NumeriQC) and Dominic Vienot (ERAI) enjoy the
presentations.
Mathieu Ferland tells us what went right, and wrong, with the production
of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell.
Chapter advisor Dominique Roussy (DC Studios), Dominic Brown (Beenox) and
Vincent Brisebois (Discreet) mingle after the presentations.
Freelance artist
Danny Oros can't stop talking about pushing pixels!
Artificial Mind & Movement (the IGDA's only Montreal-based Studio
Affiliate) in full force.