Serge Landry, co-founder of Miralupa, shared with me the stats they got after they just released a new version for Chromia Wars:

- 1760 games played in the last 5 days

- 69% of new gamers vs 31% existing

- average playtime: 8mn

- 15% are finishing the game

What’s more interesting is also the sales: +22% IAP for the paid version . The MARGE platform is geared to be used by other developers, who can use those stats for better marketing, and perhaps even later use the lobby to drive even more users

What’s next? Miralupa will be launching soon an Android version, with an optimized version for the Xperia Play. Sony-Ericsson for instance is looking for Augmented Reality apps for the Xperia Play and Chromian Wars is a good candidate for their tablet.

It’s a diverse group of investors, with investors mainly from Montreal but also from Vancouver, and with a good mic mix of VCs and angel investors. The startup has now relocated to Vancouver, BC, and the $1m investment will be used to help hire a team there.

What’s also interesting here is that it’s the first startup in FounderFuel’s first cohort to announce its first successful investment, and this sends a strong message to all of those who are still not sure about the accelerator program.

Playerize already announced a seed round back at the FounderFuel demo day, quoting huge uptake from the service, both from users and customers, and has since then developed the service to include more platforms. Playerize is at the interesection of gaming, social, web, mobile and saas, with demonstrated revenues, plus also a viral growth strategy baked-in. The team is also neat experience in business and startups. What more could you ask for in a startup?

Checkout also wavo.me’s story about FounderFuel, if you want to read more about founderfuel

The video game mobile startup Miralupa is launching today Chromian Wars on the App Store, a mobile multiplayer game, where players are invited to battle tanks against each other, using real-world surfaces. It’s quite impressive to see the game already out, as they were still prospecting offices in Q2 this year. Their development cycle is probably faster than a few web startups in the city!

With a simple graphic printed on a piece of paper, players can start or join a game, and then control their tanks with the touchscreen. What’s interesting is the camera and sensors tracking, meaning you can also control the game by moving or rotating your iPad, à la Wii.

Chromian Wars is just a first step for Miralupa, and while they have high hopes to revolutionize the gaming industry, the game is quite basic. It has standard 3D visuals, the story won’t win any award, and the music neither. What Miralupa hopes to achieve though is to give that sense of wonder for people who will be trying out the game, and at the same time, interest enough independent game developers as well as studios in their technology. Named MARGE, the Augmented Reality technology developed the game is planned to be available to third-parties, making it a building block on both the iOS and Android platform.

Check out the game. It’s available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, with a version for Android already planned.

gOsuway is a brand new startup launched last week in close beta (i.e. accessible only with an invitation). It’s the brainchild of Pheze and “Torpille Rose”, two new entrepreneurs who want to connect gaming fans with status updates and shared media.

The site in itself looks a lot like Twitter, with users having different profiles, friending options, plus also an invitation to share screens, videos and links. According to gOsuway founders, a lot of time was spent tweaking the user signup process, thinking about badges and other UX features to encourage social activity.

Ultimately, gOsuway wants to gather all the fans who are watching starcaft2 replays over and over, or other highly competitive games. Currently, what most gamers do is subscribe on special youtube channels featuring voice commentary of matches, or subscribe on forums, where top games are featured by the community. gOsuway would offer fans and progamers of having their own channel, and like Twitter, be able to receive in real-time the updates. gOsuway also indicated on its homepage that groups and leagues will be supported soon, plus monetization options.

The idea of gOsuway is interesting, although it might have been simpler to have a dedicated Facebook/Twitter account, and invite friends & other members to post there. That’s what most progamers and procommenters do these days, and based on the huge following they have, it does seem to do the job. Even a simple match on youtube gets quickly thousands of comments by fans. Even if you needed your own “twitter for gamers” for branding purposes, having an identi.ca instance seems more natural than building a web app from scratch. In the end, what matters though if that community would welcome the special unique features that gOsuway has for them, and if the gamers would be ready to spend additional dollars to see pros playing. The 2 cofounders seem to allude so, believing that the starcraft craze that created an industry in South Korea would grow in north american countries.

Last friday, 30 to 40 people gathered at engineering school ETS with the goal of producing a game in just one weekend. It was nice to see the organizing team Conjure inviting designers, writers and artists for the weekend, plus also attendees from outside Montréal. That’s how you get pioneering ideas!

The event is part of the Global Game Jam, a worldwide event highlighting innovation, creativity and experimentation. A staggering total of 1,400 games were registered worldwide for the event.

At ETS, the attendees broke into teams, equivalent to 10 games, after a long brainstorming on possible concepts Friday. Not all games got finished on Sunday. A few had trouble in team management & communication, technical issues, or with work prioritization. All attendees gave 100% of their energy to the weekend though. It’s rare to see someone so dedicated to a job that they’ll stay near their desk for 3 days, bringing over their sleeping bags, energy bars and drinks!

We’ve got games like Sumi-E, which plays on the theme of dissolving memories.

Sumi-E was picked up by the jury as the best of the weekend, as it has a good balance of art, gameplay, completeness and also a clear future potential. Perhaps on a flash website or on touchscreen tablet? It would make a hit on the Apple Store!

Other games like Fataliste had great art direction, while other games like Dead Sperm offered a simple, quick and fun experience. Like in all other games, it was impressive to see that a couple of programmers could get a game running in just 3 days, with graphics, sound, game mechanics, levels, all implemented. There was also a hex board game called Acceptance, Negotiation, depression, showcasing the diversity of the games produced during the event.

Other games were: FADE, DiscoDuck, Rovo, Space Escape, The enemy within, SQRL.

A panel of judges made of experienced producers/designers from Montréal’s video games studios and reps from IGDA came Sunday. The panel praised (rightfully) the work done by everyone, and also encouraged to work more on the presentation and marketing of the ideas. They saw the value of the games, and each said it’s a perfect start for a video games career!

If you were at the Global Games Jam, congratulations! There isn’t much compared to the experience of racing for 3 days, giving all you’ve got to get something working in what seems to be an impossible deadline.

Congratulations also to the organizing team for getting this together in Montreal.

The winning team behind Sumi-E

See more pictures

The event is part of a global movement, with many other cities and thousands of game developers & designers taking part in the event. Check out the video:

Here in Montréal, the event will start on January 28th around 6 PM, which will explain to the jammers the schedule. Around 7:15 PM all will start the collective brainstorm.

The purpose of the brainstorm is to generate a high number of strong ideas in a short period of time and allow the participants to get in touch with each other. Attendees form small groups of 5-10 people and are asked to sum up their best ideas to the crowd. At the last iteration, jammers will be asked to push the best one. After the collective brainstorm, the jammers will create teams, which will work days and nights until January 30th. Then the event will continue days and nights until January 30th. Sunday 3:30 PM, everyone will get to play the games produced during the jam with final selection by the jury by 5:30pm. The jury’s favourite game will receive the big prize!

Great to see this student initiative. If you have friends or coworkers interested in 3D, video games, UI, or game-inspired apps (akoha?), then it might be worth to participate, at least as a game or level designer!

What’s stunning about this new project is that he’s done a working iPad game in less than 2 weeks, and it also uses the Unreal SDK (UDK), which means the game has current gen graphics and models. Coupled with the touchscreen interface, this promises to be a fun game.

Louis Cleroux said any entrepreneur should have a hard look at iPad prospects. For instance, a previous iPad application Louis released on the iTMS got 100k downloads even though it still needed work. Now, Louis hopes to spend more time and resources for this project, possibly with outside partners and investors.

For Montreal video games indies, there are 3 interesting events this month for designers and developers alike:

• Ludum Dare is a marathon to produce a game in just under one weekend. It running now, since Friday evening. This announcement is of course a bit late to participate, but you still have time to check out how you can mobilize your resources, time to produce a fully fledged game in such a short span of time
• Klik of the month is today at 7.00pm. Create something in the Klik & Play authoring editor.
• Experimental gameplay invites designers this month to submit a video game with the theme “drawing”. Teams have a maximum of 7 days to produce a day.

Even if you are not a video games developer, I find those events extremely interesting, since they are under very demanding constraints in terms of time and brains available, and as a consequence, developers must be very creative in their choice of tools, development methodology, and also in terms of product design.

Of course, another reason is that most software nowadays has a gaming component. There’s obviously web apps like Akoha, but there are also many others, with a social and gaming component aimed at increasing traction, return visits, and virality.

Yesterday, coworking space Station-C featured ARMTL’s second meetup, with 15 or so developers, designers and entrepreneurs discussing augmented reality’s potential.

The talks covered available hardware on the market, mainly mobile devices, and also discussed available image recognition and 3D software on the market. There were lots of interaction, with a few fun moments where we had the opportunity to try out augmented reality apps on the iPhone, such as ARDefender

Like many other augmented reality apps, there is an exciting novelty moment for the first 5 minutes. Most attendees agreed though we were only at the discovery phase of the technology, and there’s now an opportunity to experiment and see all the future potential.

Jean-François Kitchiguine (@kitchiguine), instigator of the meetup, went through a tutorial on adding a simple layer to LAYAR, a free augmented reality app with more than 1 million users on the iPhone and Android platform. It’s possible for users to add points of interests, 2D and 3D elements to LAYAR through a third-party web service or data store, a system similar to Google Maps.

Mike and Paul, 2 Montréal developers also took the opportunity to present MixAR, an AR project currently on kickstarter. They already released a first AR app on the app store, and are looking to release their AR editor in Spring next year.

Hope to see even more people at the next ARMTL meetup!

The CBC reports that Montréal-based Cirque du Soleil and acclaimed canadian director James Cameron are partnering for theatrical projects, with a first movie underway, directed by Shrek’s director. James Cameron, who instigated the 3D development behind Avatar, will be bringing his technology expertise as an executive producer.

As most of you knows, the Cirque du Soleil has a unique talent in creating mesmerizing worlds, bringing together top acrobatic performance, music, beautifully designed costumes and lights, making the company one of the city’s gems, alongside other giants such as Bombardier. As such, this new partnership with James Cameron, also creator of new worlds such as Aliens, the Abyss, The Terminator, etc. will make the new movie one of the most anticipated, and intriguing.

Technology-wise, even though the visual effects will be done by Reel FX, a Dallas/Santa Monica company, this new partnership will foster new technological expertise in Montréal. Indeed, 3D movie capturing requires unique cameras, special calibrating gear, as well as a whole array of software to handle the data and recreate the 3D layers. Montréal has already a well-renowned industry in visual effects, a solid TV and cinema industry, as well as video games companies dabbling in live action movies, such as Ubisoft studios. With Cirque du Soleil Images and 3D expertise, Montréal will have a unique position as a city which excels both high tech and art.

Will we see acrobats becoming movie stars — since faces and bodies can be created at will in digital 3d, or will be they mere “props”? Or will we see next Cirque du Soleil shows with acrobats dancing in a 3D background? Or perhaps Cirque du Soleil-inspired movements and choregraphies in Avatar 2?