That’s right, it’s nearly time for the Scottish Game Jam 2014!
The SGJ this coming year will be held at the Glasgow Caledonian University and the sister site at Abertay University Dundee on the 24th to the 26th of January.
If you’ve never heard of the Scottish Game Jam before, well shame on you, it’s only the biggest game jam in the country and is part of the biggest game jam in the world – The Global Game Jam. Every year amazing game developers get together for 48 hours to create some truly brilliant games such as last year’s Scottish Game Jam overall winner, Lub Vs Dub.
In 2013, over 38 titles were created, from artful story telling games; board games; horror games and even a networked text adventure! But, it’s not just the creation of the games which draws people to the Scottish Game Jam. The atmosphere in the building while teams are furiously creating their projects is intoxicating and one of the main reasons people keep coming back every year. There are games to play with your fellow developers, prizes to be won, pizza to eat and great banter all round.
So if you’re feeling creative, love making games and are a little bit mad, then join us at one of the two sites in January! You’ll need to sign up at your preferred site at one of the links below!
Also don’t forget you can learn more about the Global Game Jam on their new site.
And that’s not all, following the jam, in February, IGDA Scotland will hosting a pair of Play Parties in both Dundee and Glasgow where teams can show off their games, play everyone’s games, and vote on their favourites. We’ll update you with the full details of these events closer to the time.
Last year the Scottish Game Jam had over 200 jammers in attendance making it the biggest in the UK and in the top 10 in the world. If you want to be part of what is always one of the best weekends in game development then join us at the Scottish Game Jam 2014!
]]>In this post, IGDA Scotland volunteer Finlay Thewlis recaps the chapter meeting held June 12th in the Hannah Maclure Centre, Dundee. Thanks as always to our excellent sponsors in Dundee – The University of Abertay Dundee, and of course to our excellent speakers without whom this event would not have been such a great success!
Opening the IGDA Dundee meeting was Luke Dicken who told us that we had SOLD OUT of spaces at the meeting! That certainly shows an appetite for all things IGDA. Various other aspects showed how the ball is really rolling with IGDA Scotland now, such as the Chapter’s progression and a number of special events which are coming up. We then moved onto the regular Open Mic part of the evening which contained a myriad of awesome job vacancies, networking opportunities and attendees with games they wanted to share with everyone. It was great example of the openness within Scotland’s developer community and appetite to contribute and share.
David Thomson of Ludometrics then gave the first talk in the ‘Post Mortem’ style which always gives fellow developers and games types the frank and honest assessment of what went well and where mistakes were made. Bips was what David coined as a ‘Dave-Wave’, although in this case he wasn’t referring to spark of a concept from himself but in fact one of the Godfathers of the Scottish Games Industry, Dave Jones. The project came with an additional aim where the ever-unique Denki wanted to try out some new production/design processes and this was an ideal opportunity to do it.
The main aspect of the insightful post-mortem was that you need to tailor your development processes to your team and your project, square shapes won’t fit into a circular gap so don’t feel forced into having to accept a process or development method that you aren’t convinced is right for your respective project/team.
Yann Seznec from Lucky Frame was next up and he gave a session mainly deconstructing their iOS game Bad Hotel. There was a distinction right from the off from Yann that “we’re a ‘Creative Studio’ not just a games studio”, I think underlining the idea of ‘what makes a game a game?’ and that developers shouldn’t rule themselves out of doing certain work if they don’t feel it qualifies in their pre-conceptions of what they understand a game to be.
Overall Yann delivered a really bright and confident talk on the issues encountered in the development of Bad Hotel even going as far as to show us the game’s sales, revenues and background to the company’s operation. All these aspects constituted a talk that sheda lot of light on subjects many developers are instinctively quiet about and that was a major victory for the evening. It begs the question will there be a trend of developers becoming more increasingly open with aspects such as sales and their shortcomings?
Finally we had Sandy Duncan from YoYo Games who gave a decidedly more informal talk than the first two, refusing to give in to the oppression of PowerPoint having a worked at Microsoft in his past! Sandy took us through the background of YoYo and the origins of their GameMaker engine. Overall Sandy communicated how important he considers HTML5 as a platform and showed the strength of how timing of when a developer come into a market can be almost direction-changing when a platform or market opportunity is met with a prepared and able team there to take an idea forward. This can secure funding for projects that might not be considered by the masses of the games industry as not having any viability, at least yet.
The IGDA Scotland meeting in Dundee was a window into what makes the games industry in Scotland such a special place, the inclusiveness, warm, relaxed nature of the night and anyone hesitating to attend any IGDA meetings in any of the three locations we visit (Dundee, Glasgow & Edinburgh) should really get involved, it’s never too late to learn something helpful, meet someone new or find someone for that job vacancy you’ve been wanting to fill.
Don’t just watch this space, fill it!
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Another month, another Chapter meeting down, and yet another venue left finding extra seating from places unknown to this dimension. We’d like to thank all of you guys for coming and making it ugh a wonderful night. We hope there will be many to come.
Another big thanks to speakers Marc Williamson and Brian Baglow for providing the nights thought provoking entertainment. We’ve even been able to cobble together a recording of Brian’s talk, which will be added to University compulsory viewing lists everywhere.
We’d also like to express our thanks to Tag Games for graciously sponsoring the event and making keeping us going. They’re doing some pretty awesome stuff right now, including developing some killer IP in their new sister studio Tagplay. Good eh?
Also I owe a thank you to Mr Raz Ullah from the Hannah Maclure Centre for looking after us all and making sure everything technical went without a hitch.
Moving on from Dundee we look forward to the future of the Chapter. It may surprise you to know that although we’ve been going for a good 4 months, we aren’t yet official an international IGDA Chapter. To do that, we have just one more thing to do: hire a committee.
This month we’re waving goodbye to our Chapter founder Hazel McKendrick, who’s tireless work got the ball rolling. Hazel now heads south to join Guildford based studio Hello Games, and we wish her all the best!
We’re looking at making the Chapter something we can sustain, and for that to stand a chance it is required by the IGDA that all chapters elect a steering committee of enthusiastic volunteers who have the drive to make things happen.
Having a committee in charge won’t change much about the Chapter from the eyes of an outsider. We’ll still be welcoming everyone to give their opinion and their voice, as well as keeping an open door policy to volunteers and keeping total transparency for everyone interested in what’s going on with the Chapter.
The committee will be a sort of “A-Team” that everything goes through. They’ll have the sign off on what happens. It won’t be just one or two people either. We’ll need a Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer and a Secretary. These individuals will have their own specialised responsibilities. It’s a team that can cover a large amount of ground, but is open enough to still benefit greatly from external input.
We’ll be giving out a lot more details on this new election process closer to our next meeting in Glasgow towards the end of the month (We’re still working on the details) Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions you’d like to share with us.
The informal reigns of the Chapter’s communications and resources are now currently in the hands of Kraig Walker and Brian McDonald. We can’t wait to get started with the future of Scotland’s IGDA Chapter and raising the industry to an all new high!
Where: The Hannah Maclure Centre, The University of Abertay Dundee
When: Wednesday, 24th August, 2011 - Doors open @ 7pm
*Make sure you register with us on Eventbrite for access to appear on Abertay Union’s bar guest list (no drinks purchase required)*
It’s that time already folks! The IGDA Scotland chapter is back in Dundee for a night conversations, controversy and carry-on!
We kicked off the chapter way back in May with a get together of developers and figures in the Industry, and carried some excellent momentum of followers and supporters across Scotland and the rest of the UK. We’d like to thank everyone that’s helped make this happen for their continued help and support, it wouldn’t have happened without you!
Besides rubbing shoulder’s with the Scotland’s greatest and brightest minds in the Games Industry, we’ve also got two highly esteemed speakers for you on the night!
Graciously sponsoring the event are Dundee based Tag Games; pioneers of mobile and digital gaming in Dundee. Tag are entering their sixth year as a studio, and have already ramped up a pretty sturdy portfolio of titles using their own IP as well as their clients. We’ll have Tag’s very own Marc Williamson, their Head of Production, helping as a speaker for us.
Secondly we’ll have a voice that’s been a long time coming. Listing all of this man’s exploits and activities would require a whole new blog post, but some of his past positions were held at DMA Design, Denki, Rockstar. He even has his own T-Shirt for crying out loud! I can only be talking about the self proclaimed voice of the Scottish games industry and editor of Scottishgames.net: Mr Brian Baglow!
We’ll be hosting this blockbuster in Abertay University’s Hannah Maclure Centre, it’s quite cushy – has a cinema bit an’ all. Since the centre is above Abertay’s award winning multistory union we’ve been asked to keep a tab on who’s who from the management. You may know that union booze is the best booze, because it’s cheap; and they like to keep the football pub crawls away from their sacred stuff – they can ruin the ambience…
However, make sure you register for the event on our Eventbrite page and they’ll be no such quibble! Get em’ telt!
What makes this meeting even more special is our collaboration with Bert Wednesdays, which will make sure the fun and socialising can continue long after we get kicked out of the Hannah Maclure Centre.
We can’t wait to see you all there! Our doors are open to everyone, IGDA member or not! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and become a Facebook Groupie and Like us! for all the latest developments, and to find out how you can get involved with the IGDA Scotland Chapter.
]]>When: Thursday, 11th August, 2011 @ 7pm
Interested in what’s going on with the IGDA Scotland Chapter? Want to chip in your thoughts and ideas to help make it even more awesome? Then make sure to join us Tomorrow night on Skype for a group chat where we go over everything that’s in motion for the next meetup in Dundee along with other things we’ll be using to extend the Chapter’s outreach.
Heres how to get on the chat:
Within Skype, simply add your’s truly kraig.walker to your contact list.
When you’re doing this you can also add “IGDA” in the accompanying message to prevent any confusion. Then on the other end you’ll be added to the group chat a little bit before 7pm but you can come in at anytime during.
Can’t make it at that time? Don’t worry, we’ll be posting a document out similar to the one we did for Edinburgh on our Facebook Group and Google Group.
Also, if you’ve taken part in any of our previous skye chats then there’s no need to do anything! We’ll be using the same conversation space as always.
Hope to speak to you soon!
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