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!
]]>We’d like to thank each of the 8 speakers for their role in making this evening a great success. The evening went very well and there were a lot of laughs as the presenters got to grips with the new format. It’s great to see people out supporting their chapter, and we’d also like to thank all of the attendees for coming along. Don’t worry if you missed the stories and ideas presented, the talks were recorded, and you can find them all embedded in the playlist below.
Remember, you can find many videos of our meetings on our YouTube channel, and make sure to keep an eye on the calendar area of the homepage so that you don’t miss out on attending more great events by IGDA Scotland.
]]>
The event will feature high profile speakers from around the UK, talking about how they got their start, how they think students should get started now as well as some of the biggest challenges they see for the industry as a whole. Here are just a small sampling of the speakers who will be available on the day
Currently Gary Carr is the creative director at Lionhead studios having worked alongside Peter Molyneux on the studio’s flagship game series ‘Fable’ for a number of years. He also worked on legendary games such as Theme Hospital, Theme park and Populus at Bullfrog Productions.
Patrick Connor is a Senior Engineer at SCEE’s R&D, he graduated from Abertay University in 2003 he has since gone on to work at Lionhead Studios in the Engine team for Fable 2 and 3. He has experience of working with various gaming hardware including mobile platforms as well as console and PC. His expertise covers GPU and multi-threaded programming, stereoscopic 3D and performance analysis and optimisation.
Mitu Khandaker runs The Tiniest Shark, about to launch their first title “RedShirt”, a parody game whose concept is social simulator set on a spacestation. Mitu is one of Develop’s 30 Under 30, a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit and sits on the Advisory Board for the Advocacy Track at the Game Developers Conference among many other claims to fame.
Dr Jo Twist took the role of CEO of Ukie in January 2012. Dr Twist was Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for Education where she commissioned Digital Emmy-winning Battlefront II, a stable of free to play browser and iOS games, including Sweatshop, Nomnation and International Racing Squirrels, as well as social media projects. Previous positions include Multiplatform Commissioner for BBC Entertainment & Switch, BBC Three Multiplatform Channel Editor and in a former life was a technology reporter for BBC News. With a background in digital media, education, creative technology and youth culture, and a PhD in online communities, identity and young people, Twist brings a wealth of experience in all aspects of interactive entertainment including media, technical innovation and creativity, commercial and political issues.
Alongside these talks, other sessions will be running that will focus on getting into various disciplines within the games industry. Each of these events will be run by industry veterans in those fields. A wide variety of “Getting into” sessions will be covered including both traditional and, somewhat, less traditional disciplines of the industry. These include ‘Getting into’: programming, academia, game art, games journalism and game design and more! There will also be sessions aimed at demystifying the recruitment process with CV workshop sessions running looking how to make your CV the best it possibly can be, portfolio workshops on how to polish up your portfolio and talks on internships in the games industry.
The event will be running from 9.30-17:00 at the UWS Paisley campus and wherever your interest in the industry lies, we hope to see you on the 4th of December! For a more information and up to date information on speakers, make sure to check out the GamesWest website.
]]>
Thanks as always to everyone who made this an absolutely brilliant night, from the speakers, to the volunteers, the audience who packed out the venue – and of course not forgetting The University of Abertay, Dundee who provided the venue.
You can find the videos embedded below, or pay a visit to our Youtube page, where you can find recordings from this meeting as well as many of our others.
Bips! – David Thomson, Ludometrics
Bad Hotel – Yann Seznec, Lucky Frame
HTML 5 – Sandy Duncan, YoYo Games
]]>
Please enjoy “Life of Play, Life of the Mind – What Game Design Can Teach Us”
]]>
In this post, IGDA Scotland volunteer Jamey Stevenson summarises the special event held on 2nd July in association with Glasgow Caledonian University in which Richard Lemarchand, former Lead Designer at Naughty Dog presented a Masterclass titled “Life of Play, Life of the Mind: What Game Design Can Teach Us”.
Earlier this month, Glasgow Caledonian University played host to game industry veteran Richard Lemarchand, who delivered an articulate and enlightening masterclass, presented in partnership with IGDA Scotland. The event garnered a huge turnout; the GCU lecture hall in which it was held was packed to the rafters with enthusiastic attendees. Judging from the quick survey conducted by Richard at the start of his talk, it was also quite a diverse audience – one that included educators, students, professional developers, and hobbyists alike.
For those familiar with Richard’s background, it will perhaps come as no surprise that the crowd he draws is such a heterogeneous group. Professional game makers often talk about “bridging the divide” between industry and academia, and it seems that the perceived gulf between the two camps can often appear equally daunting from either side. But Richard’s own journey has now taken him across that gap and found him not only surviving the transition, but loving every minute it. Whether as Lead Designer of the acclaimed Uncharted series at Naughty Dog, or in his current position as a Professor of Game Design at the venerable USC interactive media program, Richard has managed to achieve success on both sides of the purported industry/academia boundary, seemingly with with minimal hand-wringing along the way.
One of the recurring themes of Richard’s talk was the benefit of being “interested in everything”, and how maintaining an abiding spirit of curiosity can serve to enrich one’s life. He identified this same open-minded, exploratory approach to the world as an essential skill for game designers to cultivate. The overarching subject of the presentation was the many ways in which the skills that had proven most essential to Richard’s evolution as a game designer were also highly applicable to his current role as a teacher. This topic was illustrated via a personal tour of Richard’s career, from his enduring fascination with indie and art games, to his role in shaping AAA blockbusters, and an intriguing glimpse into the methods used to teach game design at USC.
Despite the fact that his message included many pearls of wisdom for both aspiring and experienced game developers, the underlying basis for the talk was much more humanistic. While the notion of a “Masterclass” might have easily been misconstrued to imply a sort of forbidding, “elites only” mentality, the atmosphere that Richard created could not have been more warm and inviting. Throughout the talk, he displayed a readily apparent knack for conveying information with a tone that was inclusive enough to accommodate those with little more than passing knowledge of digital games. It was enough to make me envious of his students!
In keeping with his holistic approach to games and learning, the mix of concepts Richard covered was incredibly expansive: everything from homebrew and zine culture, Fluxus, flow, playtesting and prototoyping was included in the discussion. There were far too many compelling ideas whirling around to be listed here, but a few other personal highlights included:
- Finding out what books constitute the “core texts” of the USC program: Game Design Workshop and Rules of Play, certainly a solid foundation for teaching design fundamentals
- Hearing Richard’s take on the most useful subjects for game designers to study (systems design and human psychology got shout outs)
- Richard’s pragmatic, thoughtful stances on recurring debates like whether games are art and whether it’s truly possible to teach creative skills like game design (short answer: yes to both, but with a lot of nuance)
- The similarities between being a teacher and a Dungeon Master
- The concept of “vulnerability” in Uncharted, and how it informed Richard’s teaching style
Overall, it was a highly informative and engaging lecture from the newly graduated Doctor Lemarchand. Please join us in congratulating Richard on receipt of an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Technology from Glasgow Caledonian University. We’d also like express our thanks to GCU for their assistance arranging this special appearance from such a talented speaker. Those who didn’t attend definitely missed out on something special. But don’t fret! Video of the session is expected to be available shortly, and there are plenty more great events coming your way in the near future courtesy of IGDA Scotland, so keep watching this space.
In August 2011, Brian Baglow did a session for us called “Developers: Stop Being Shit”. This talk went viral to game developers around the world, and went on to spawn one of the highest rated sessions at Develop in Brighton in 2012, although they did ask Brian to change the title.
In September 2011, we met in Glasgow and Interim Chapter Leader Kraig Walker gave a short session on the state of the chapter at that time, and where the chapter was heading.
The same night saw a session from long time friend of the chapter Daniel Livingstone of UWS presenting work undertaken by students using a unofficial Kinect SDK (this was in the days before the official SDK was released).
Brian Hackett of Claymore Games gave a presentation as well, covering the way that they transitioned from developing using Java to moving to the iOS platform.
In April of 2012, Chapter Leader Brian McDonald gave a short talk about the first year of operation for the chapter, how things had progressed and what we were looking to do in the future.
We’ll be posting more videos of more recent talks, as well as getting more of our meetings recorded. Thanks to everyone for their continued support, and to the volunteers who have recorded and edited these sessions together.
]]>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!
]]>The masterclass will tell the story of Richard’s transition from AAA console game designer to game design Professor, and the challenges he faced in learning how to teach the “dark art” of game design. Richard will talk about the positive impact that indie games, art games and experimental games can have on the design of blockbuster games like Uncharted, and will describe the incredible opportunities for success he sees for all teachers and researchers who adopt a playful, game designerly attitude in their practice.
A passionate advocate of indie and experimental games, Richard has been involved with the IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games for several years. He organizes the annual GDC Microtalks, a session that celebrates games and play with short talks by diverse speakers, and he is a faculty member of the GDC Experimental Gameplay Sessions.
The masterclass is FREE and takes place from 17:30-20:30. Please note that places are strictly limited! To register please go here.
This means that our original plan for a meetup in Edinburgh will be postponed until later in the month. More details to follow soon!
]]>
TL;DR – Please help out the chapter by volunteering to help us. Fill in this form.
In the past year at IGDA Scotland we’ve been fortunate to have some excellent people volunteering to help us out with our activities. Everything we do as a group is entirely based around people spending their own time to make it happen.
We’re grateful to those that have helped up until now, whether taking photos at events, checking people in at the door or helping us find and set up venues or even writing articles to keep our website up to date.
We need more people to step up and help out so that we can share the workload. For students it can be an excellent way of building up your CV with some community-oriented work (which also works really well on your IGDA Scholarships application). For professionals, it’s a great way to give something back to the community, as well allowing you to take a role in shaping that community.