Four Laurentian University grads combined their powers during the Sudbury Game Design Challenge Jan. 13 - 15, to bring Sudbury comic book hero Big Nick to life as a video game character.
Team Zombie Rat Spider Bats, made up of LU nursing grads Katy Peacock and Carter Smith, along with mechanical engineering grads Josh Martin and Daryl Dominque drew Big Nick as the protagonist for their video game at the 48-hour game design challenge and managed to create a unique, fun, and most importantly, playable video game.
"We're all new to the entire process," said Martin. "Daryl and I had some experience with programming, but building a video game from scratch was something completely new to us. We were all learning along the way."
While Martin and Dominique headed up the technical side of things for the most part, Peacock and Smith took the lead on the creative end, making sure to keep the game as true to the Big Nick comic as possible.
Never heard of Big Nick? Don't feel bad, because neither had the design team before the competition.
"I had no idea that this was even a thing," said Peacock. "Carter and I read the comic book and we tried to make the game as true to the source material as we could."
That would require a bit of manoeuvring on the team's part, as the format for determining your game's theme and what had to be included was through drawing random Lego blocks with words on them.
"The enemy of Big Nick in the comic is [a giant robotic moose]," said Smith. The team christened the game's villain Northern Moose. "So we had to do some searching around and trade blocks in order to get the one with the Northern Moose on it so we could include it in the game."
And so was born, "Big Nick vs. The Northern Moose". The game itself is distinctly Sudbury with Big Nick utilizing the Big Nickel as his shield and weapon. The enemies he encounters along the way include geese, deer, wolves, and of course, the Northern Moose.
Team Zombie Rat Spider Bats went the extra step to put some Sudbury-flavoured finishing touches on the game, procuring the voice talents of Hot 93.5 Morning Hot Tub host G-Rant to voice Big Nick.
Sudbury.com got an exclusive look at the game when team Zombie Rat Spider Bats stopped by our offices to show off their creation. Check out the video above to see who was able to slay the beast!
