Artifical Mind & Movement is one of Montreal’s largest independent game development studios with over 500 members of staff, and a portfolio of licensed titles including Indiana Jones, The Sims, Iron Man and Scene It? Earlier this year, the company also released its own original intellectual property, WET, with publishing partner Bethesda.

Here, A2M’s senior director of development services Liza Wood discusses how WET has acted as a calling card to show off the creative talent of the company, why Canada is a vibrant games development community, and how the Montreal International Games Summit is an essential event for promoting the region.

Q: For those that aren’t too familiar with the business, can you give us a brief overview of Artificial Mind & Movement?

Liza Wood: Artificial Mind & Movement is quite a large independent games developer in Montreal. Part of out business is contract games development where we develop licensed IP. Recent titles include MySims Racing, and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. The other part of our business is developing original intellectual property like WET, which came out in September.

In my role as senior director of development services, I’m responsible for three areas that are common services to all teams. One is the technology team that builds the technology for our Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games. The second is the user experience team which design and build all the menus and HUDs for the game, and the last is our outsourcing project manager who co-ordinates all out outsourcing needs.

Continued at GameIndustry.biz

The average game development cycle involves a client, concept and production period followed by the game release. WET however has been anything but this clear cut. If WET were a human being, she would be as incredibly resilient as her heroine, Rubi, considering all that she has gone through to finally appear on shelves. Taking a look back at the long history of this project, one must admit that it has been a complex and interesting journey.

Event Details:

When: Wednesday, November 4th @ 7:00pm
What: IGDA-Montreal Presentation Night
Where: The SAT, 1195 St.Laurent
Why: Stéphane Roy discussing production of Wet
Who: All game developers, and those related to the game industry
Entry: free for IGDA members; $5 for non-members

Xbox360Asylum.ca is dedicated towards the cause of introducing Canadians to amazing home grown talents that we enjoy in this great country. Artificial Mind and Movement is a perfect example of such homegrown talent. Based in Montreal, Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) is Canada’s leading independent game developer, employing 500 talented people in Montreal (Quebec) and Santiago (Chile). Since 1992, A2M has released 70 titles across every game platform, with over 28 million copies sold worldwide. Our studios work with the industry’s top publishers and licensors, including Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, Disney, Electronic Arts, Fox, Konami, LucasArt, Viacom and Warner.

On September 15, Artificial Mind & Movement will be celebrating the release of WET, their first Xbox 360 title, Patrick Fortier, the Creative Director of WET took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions concerning the anticipated game.

Creative Director Patrick Fortier and the WET design team went all in on making their hot female anti-hero.

An interview with A2M Montreal’s Patrick Fortier, about the upcoming game Wet.

Wet is reborn with all-new gameplay showing off the stylistic Rage mode.

Did anyone else notice the popular Hollywood Wilhelm scream in there?

From gametrailers.com:

Get a good look at some gameplay in the Wet video game.

When Vivendi Games and Activision merged, people were understandably concerned about the future of games like Ghostbusters, Brutal Legend and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. But there was another game in publishing limbo: A2M’s Wet. Although it didn’t have the installed fanbase of the above three titles and despite that it doesn’t have a publisher yet, Wet sounds pretty cool and its developers say it will be ready to come out in 2009.

Wet is a PS3 and 360 shooter that stars Rubi, a badass chick who lives in a junkyard and destroys dudes with a variety of weapons. The goal of the developers, however, was to make an "acrobatic shooter" in which gunplay and graceful moves are combined.

Source

It’s okay if you’ve forgotten about Wet, as it seems like everyone else has as well. Though dropped after the Activision-Vivendi merger, the sexy A2M-developed action game is apparently still planned to hit PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at some point in 2009.

These screenshots are brought to you by middleware company Illuminate Labs, which provided the technology for the game’s lighting, as noticed by Cinema Blend.

Source