LevelUp Play KL 2019 9 November 2019

The past weekend I attended the LevelUp Play event held at the KL Convention Center organized by Level Up KL. So what is Level Up KL ? From their site:

LEVEL UP KL is a biggest game festival in Malaysia organized by Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), with the mandate to spearhead the digital economy in Malaysia. The goal is to create a platform for gamers, public, game developers, corporate and esports to leverage on the biggest entertainment market as key economic growth for the region.

LevelUp Play was a follow up event from their industry workshop, conference and program up which is open to the public to showcase some of the local game developments such as GigaBash from Passion Republic or Streamline Games with their latest title Bake ‘N Switch among many others. It was impressive to see that there are quite a number of talented local game developers, designers and artists that can easily rival our western counterparts. The platform provided by LevelUp is an excellent initiative to support our local gaming industry as we’re never short of talents and we are in the unique position to target the Asian gaming market.

Throughout the hall, I tried a number of game demos from smaller indie startups both local and regional with very creative and original ideas. It was refreshing to see how these startups was able to fully realize their game with limited budget and resources through some use of creative assets and art direction while focusing on gameplay elements. Sony was also present at the event to demo their upcoming releases such as the much anticipated Iron Man VR and Nioh 2. Towards the end of the hall, there was several eSports tournaments being held featuring PUBG, DOTA and the classic Street Fighter V.