Education/training
Ambush! Trivia advances to second round of competitionIADT team takes Canadian Video Game Competition by surpriseWhile Trivial Pursuit may be a household name, the team at Cerebral Vortex Games believes their premiere title will take people by surprise. |
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 [ 2007-05-09 ] |
Eric Daniel, Michael Sauro, Blessed Vela, Keith Makse, Hafiz Kassam and Jason MacIsaac.
Ambush! Trivia is a multi-platform trivia game, which will quiz players on 10 main categories and a variety of sub-categories ranging from geography and sports to conspiracy theories and pop-culture. Questions will truly test players' mastery of the trivial bits of knowledge they have stored in their cerebrum.
"We're not just trying to make a game, we're trying to create a new obsession for casual and hardcore gamers alike," says Jason MacIsaac, design director at Cerebral Vortex Games.
The team members behind Ambush! Trivia are game developers and then some. The six-person team is comprised of three instructors from the Video Game Design & Development program at International Academy of Design and Technology (IADT) in Toronto: Keith Makse, Jason MacIsaac and Michael Sauro, and three of their exceptional student programmers, Blessed Vela, Eric Daniel and Hafiz Kassam.
Together they have created an innovative game that has powerful industry players taking notice.
Recently, Ambush! Trivia was one of four games selected to advance to the second round of Telefilm Canada's Great Canadian Video Game Competition.
Each team will receive up to $250,000 each in financing to create a playable prototype, and this September the winning company will be announced and receive up to $500,000 in funds to support the commercialization of its game.
But it's not all fun and games for student programmer Eric Daniel. In addition to devoting his time outside the classroom to work on the development of the game's engine and design, he has five courses, and is working on a major game group project in his sixth and final term at IADT.
Working with his instructors on the development of Ambush! Trivia is just the kind of experience that will help Daniel land a job as a game developer.
"The best part of the program is being able to interact with faculty who are in the in the gaming industry," Daniel says.
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