Pulau Pinang: Pouring with Pitches
Our penultimate stop in our Big Asia Tour brought us to Pulau Pinang, Malaysia’s own “Pearl of the Orient”. Despite the nickname, the capital Georgetown is a bustling destination alive with a highly diverse population and known as one of the most livable cities in Asia.
This is likely due to the proximity of some of the best beaches in Malaysia and also for being known as a restaurant paradise. The State of Penang was named top food destination by Lonely Planet in 2014 and something of which we took full advantage!
The game development community is small but growing in Georgetown and the surrounding areas. We met a lot of new teams as well as a lot of talented individuals looking to form teams of their own. It was hard to gauge how big the community is overall but we were pleasantly surprised to have 80 people turn up to our event.
Our speakers for the Pulau Pinang event included Johannes Reuben, Product Evangelist for Unity3D Technologies, Aik Siow Wee of MDeC, and GameFounders’ own Andrew Walker.
We had an amazing six local developers pitch, the most of any event so far. The highlights included – Benny Khoo with a Candy Crush-like word game, Gobinath Vanan with Demonic Dimensions, an AR-game where you can fight your neighbours for territory and Guan Lip Soon who built his own HTML5-based engine to recreate Diablo-like gameplay.
Once the event was over, we treated ourselves to a restaurant on one of Penang’s lovely beaches with some great food and company. However, the weather had other ideas and gave us a thunderstorm and a soaking to remember!