Local developers create Riverfest game for phones

For the first time, Riverfest has a video game to accompany it in 2016.

Independent game designers at Quickdraw Studios whipped up “ICT Riverfest: Sunny Days,” for Android devices in a mere 14 hours or so, said Nicolas Gallo, Quickdraw’s chief marketing officer. It’s set to come to iOS soon.

In the free game, players control a sun similar to the one in the Riverfest logo and move it up and down on the screen to avoid clouds that come shooting out from the right-hand side of the screen.

All of this takes place over a vector-graphic drawing of downtown Wichita area near the Arkansas River.

When the player travels to certain areas of Riverfest, the game’s GPS activates, and players can undertake special challenges based on their location.

It also features a local leaderboard displaying the top-scoring players.

It is not officially sponsored by Wichita Festivals, but Quickdraw Studios has been in contact with festival officials in the last two weeks, Gallo said.

“They have expressed interest for next year to make an official game that we can start as soon as possible,” Gallo said.

The creators of the official Riverfest guide app have contacted Quickdraw about including the game in their app, simply called “RiverFest.”

Quickdraw has received a fair amount of press recently – it won $10,000 by placing first in the 2016 Shocker New Venture competition in late April, and its founders spoke at a 1 Million Cups event earlier this week.

Quickdraw Studios bills itself as a marketing firm that specializes in video-game marketing, Gallo said.

“Marketing firms that use video games and not film or literature or print media or photography – I’ve never heard of it before,” Gallo said. “We wanted to differentiate ourselves from other indie companies. We wanted to keep our creativity as video game designers, but we didn’t want to be in the oversaturated indie game scene that’s popular right now.”

Its first major project was in January, creating a custom arcade game for Hopping Gnome Brewery, 1710 E. Douglas, called “Gnome Wars.”

Quickdraw Studios hopes its Riverfest game brings more attention to the group, which is currently soliciting work.

“We thought, ‘What would be the best way to get our name out and to give the community something unique … and make everybody a little proud of where they come from?’ ” Gallo said. “So we thought, ‘Well, why not a video game?’ ”

“ICT Riverfest: Sunny Days” is available for free on Google Play, and its developers assure The Eagle it will be on iOS soon.

Wichita Riverfest official site

This story was originally published June 3, 2016 at 6:29 PM with the headline "Local developers create Riverfest game for phones."