Village Gamer

Vancouver – Last evening, the GD12 students at Vancouver Film School presented their grad projects to an evaluation audience in the VFS Main Theatre. The students spend several weeks in pre-production developing their game concepts, and then an additional 12 weeks in production, bringing their concepts to life.

The first group up to the podium was Team LightSpeed, presenting their 2D Action Platformer game Travis’ Terror. The target audience for this imaginative and colourful game is children under 10, and to that end I feel that they came very close to making a product appropriate for the age group. Developed on Citrus

Light Speed

flash engine, the game’s environment is comprised of artwork which resembles colouring book drawings. The gameplay involves two modes: dreamtime and nightmare. In dreamtime mode, the environment is bright and colourful while nightmare mode has a darker colour palette. The premise of the game is to help Travis get through the game and defeat the boogeyman lurking in his closet. As the player advances through the levels, he is confronted by monsters such as dinosaurs and robots. In dreamtime mode, the monsters are small and easily defeatable. In nightmare mode the monsters are bigger and more challenging. Game progress can be saved at nightlight checkpoints, and there are toys and candies to collect along the way. The player can choose several different paths through the game, each path presenting different challenges. Travis’ Terror is a game which I feel showed hard work and attention to detail on the part of the development team, who overcame many challenges including losing a team member partway through the project.
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Victoria – ParetoLogic has gone live with their newest in anti-spyware, the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Zheng™ allows people to upload and scan a specific file on their PC. The service will then automatically detect any malware and inform the user if the file is safe or infected. Along with a simple summary, the service also provides detailed information for advanced users.

ParetoLogic’s Spyware Analysis Team (SWAT), recent finalists for VIATeC’s Team of the Year award, spearheaded the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Jerome Segura, Team Leader of SWAT, said of the project: “Zheng™ is a long term and expensive effort primarily oriented on pure research. It shows our commitment to develop new technologies and stay on the edge.”

Uploads are not limited to current ParetoLogic customers – anyone with an internet connection can have files scanned at no cost. By inviting all users to scan files, SWAT is better able to detect and remove threats. When each file is scanned, the characteristics of infected files are noted by Zheng™. These are then passed along to the Spyware Analysis Team for analysis, so they may further refine their anti-spyware technology. The more threats analyzed by Zheng™, the more fodder SWAT has for research and the better they are able to target spyware.
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