Video Game Students Unveil Capstone Projects – Junken Drivers and Catavaneer

Toronto Film School recently hosted its first-ever, entirely Zoom-enabled Student Video Game Showcase.

The 90-minute virtual event unveiled the pair of video games graduating students from Toronto Film School’s Video Game Design & Development and Video Game Design & Animation programs have spent months of hard work, dedication and many late nights completing – Junken Drivers and Catavaneer.

“Students get to practice everything that they’ve learned throughout their 15 previous months in the program, and they get to pour all of their knowledge into three months of development,” said Jean Paul Amore, Director of the Video Game Design & Development program, noting that students took on all the roles required to make their games.

Introduced by Cody Gardner – the Video Game Design & Development student who acted as design lead on the game – Junken Driver is billed as “a crazy cat cart racing game for one to four players.”

“It’s a split-screen game where each of the four players plays as one of the adorable little cats racing in big vehicles that fire off different parts of their car,” Gardner explained.

“A unique feature is that the weapons that we use, instead of being things you just pick up off the road, they’re actually parts of your vehicle that you break off and fire at the other players… this has sort of a cost-reward system involved, because the more parts you fire off your vehicle, the less you can go maximum speed.”

Sharing the same universe as Junken Drivers is Catavaneer – described by its design lead, Sasha Greene, as a one-to-four player “cooperative top-down hack ‘n slash.”

The game features a cast of four feline characters – Russell, Jojo, Kiki and Momo – as they navigate their caravan through a series of environments, from a bandit-infested forest, to a barren wasteland, to an icy mountain terrain.

“It’s a wave-based defence and you need to defend the caravan, while escorting it from the different locations along the route,” explained Greene, noting that the characters are equipped with a range of different weapons – from swords and rapiers, to axes and hammers – to fight off the game’s cast of mouse, cat and dog enemies.

Catavaneer is available for download here.

JunkenDrivers is available here.