Obviously I had to sign an NDA and if you have been reading my blog for a while you know that I will honor it entirely, but I can still tell you anything that has already been press released or is public knowledge. And make the rest of this post sound as if it is giving you some inside information.
Blitz Games is an independent developer. This means that they are a development house for hire and that means they have to compete against other developers to get contracts for most of the games they develop. Hence why most of their games are franchised titles. The company is split into three main devisions, Blitz who are family game orientated, Volatile who deal with mature games and TruSim which produces (or will produce) serious games for training purposes. And all divisions use the same set of internally developed Middleware Tools. Which obviously cuts down on cost, but their middleware is one of the few tool-sets which is cross-platform. This obviously gives them an advantage when it comes to creating games on multiple platforms and the games benefit because there is going to be little to no difference between the different versions.
Anyway the future looks bright for Blitz in general because their work creating such classics as Barbie's Horse Adventures (which is one of the few child friendly XBox titles) is allowing them to push forwards into other projects like Reservoir Dogs which is obviously based on the film, but allows the player to play through the action that was not seen in the film and Possession which allows players to control hordes or Zombies.
I had a great time on Friday and learned a lot.
Blitz is still talking Applications for future open days so if you feel inclined towards a career in the video games industry and are a UK University student I can highly recommend applying.
