Big hooray for Indies!

The Philippine Game Development Expo wraps up its first of what is hoped to be many annual installments. While it has the usual array of booths from tech brands and from gaming publishers what really took the spotlight are the independent gaming devs. The roster of local developers had a great chance to showcase their work not just to PGDX attendees but also to the other big names in game development including Unity and Nintendo.

Situated quite literally in the middle of the event, it was a delight to see Filipino indie devs really show off, with almost everyone bringing demos, inviting people to try the game, and hosting various activities as well. A few standout titles that we tried include Folktales: The Story of Pineapple by Senshi Labs which is based on the Filipino myth about the origins of Pineapple. Proudly Pinoy made the game’s features both entertaining and educational as it both tells a classic story using a new medium and of course, teaches life lessons like balancing work and play, and the importance of doing chores> It’s refreshing to see how a modern medium such as video games give new life to nearly forgotten classic stories deeply rooted in Filipino culture.  Good Knight: Bullet Hell by Team Good Knight also makes waves, as always with its brand of ‘butt clenching action’ also intertwined with Filipino folklore and mythological elements. Good Knight: Bullet Hell is becoming a huge staple in local gaming conventions with each appearance bringing new mechanics and features allowing more people to follow the game’s development directly.

The PGDX indie games alley features titles of various genres although all of them are been running on the PC platform. With the developers being able to get in touch with a developer such as Nintendo though and with the presence of people from Microsoft at PGDX, perhaps we can hope that these titles will also be seen on consoles in the near future. Also, we also can’t wait to find out what other video game conventions have in store for our Filipino Independent game developers following a good showing from PGDX.