One of the benefits students often mention about VFS is being in close proximity to potential collaborators in other disciplines. Depending on the program, there are often opportunities to forge those connections through interdepartmental student projects — such as those that exist between Sound Design for Visual Media and Game Design.

Recently, a number of VFS students from those two programs entered into DigiBC’s competition to see who could create the “Best Student Interactive Property”. Five teams were accepted as finalists, including two from VFS, and all had to present their project in five minutes to a panel of judges coinciding with DigiBC’s holiday party held at EA.

Check out what the 2011 Women in Games Scholarship winner, Larissa Baptista, had to say about the experience on her blog. She was part of the team that presented Fang Shui, which you can play on Kongregate.

We reached out to Sound Design student Aaron Tchir, who was part of one of the teams that created and presented a game called Remnant. This features the work of Game Design students Elliot Hudson, Ryan Jones, Lance Mueller, Waylon Snedker, and Luke Takeuchi, along with Sound Design students Sasha Larco, Paola Velasquez, Dan Ayers, Wil Claeys, and Andy Smith.

“The game itself is a top-down space shooter developed for the web browser/XBLA market,” says Aaron. “Players pilot a ship called the Ambassador in arcade-like dogfights.”

With “over 400 lines of dialogue and 6 voice talents recorded over 3 different recording sessions,” the sound team definitely had their hands full. “I broke the raw tracks into parts and let my audio team at it. This project wouldn’t have met its milestones without them. I got to work closely with Ryan [Jones] and got face time with everyone working on Remnant. It’s a lot of fun being in Sound Design and getting to work with the other programs.”

The Remnant team is currently working on completing the game within the next few months — so stay tuned to the their blog for more details.

Congrats to all the VFSers who took part in the competition!