Back due to popular demand, learn what went right and wrong during the development of some of your favourite Scottish titles, and gather valuable insights to aid your own projects at our second Scottish Post-Mortems session.
You lot couldn’t get enough of them last year in Dundee, so we’re taking them on tour, starting with Glasgow. Join us at the Admiral Bar on 21st May from 19:30 for a series of short post-mortem sessions from local developers, our traditional open mic, and networking with drinks.
Last year’s meeting completely sold out, so we heartily encourage you to register your spot now early while you still can! It’s early days yet, so we’ll announce the line-up nearer the date, and let you know by email. Save the date!
If you need a reminder of just how useful reflecting on the development process can be, here are last year’s excellent post-mortems below on the IGDA Scotland YouTube channel, and our recap blog post by Finlay Thewlis. They might even serve as inspiration for your own post-mortem! We will announce this year’s speakers nearer the date.
If you recently finished or launched a project of your own, we’d love to hear your game’s development story; both the ups and the downs. What lessons did you learn, what would you do differently, and what advice would you give your fellow developers? If you’re keen on sharing your triumphs and tribulations, we urge you to contact [email protected] and arrange to speak.
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We tried out a different presentation format at the Glasgow meeting. PechaKucha translates from Japanese as chit-chat, but also refers to a fun style of giving talks where each speaker has 20 slides, each of which will be shown for 20 seconds before automatically advancing – whether the speaker is ready or not!
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.
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Earlier this week, IGDA Scotland held our first meeting for 2013, beginning as we do every year by inviting teams from the Scottish GameJam to showcase what they created in the intensive 2 day event held at the end of January.
We had a record number of registrations for the event, and despite a very snowy night, we clocked around 60 people through the door in what proved to be a really enjoyable night of socialising and play, with 12 games from all three of the Scottish Game Jam sites on hand to be played.
At the end of the night, we held the now-annual awards to select IGDA Scotland’s “Pick of the Jam”, this year using a highly sophisticated and technical “clapometer” voting system. The crowd had some clear favourites among the teams that were exhibiting and expressed that loudly.
A fast and furious competitive typing game where the goal is to out type your opponents. This game also threw in some interesting additional challenges such as typing on a upside down keyboard, typing with your nose and saying aloud the incompressible word before typing.
A lovely little 2 player iPad game where you and the other player have to run on a line while avoiding the spike of the heart beat. The winner of the game is the player which collects the most hearts, seems simple enough but there are various special items such as ice which will thwart your opponents ability to control his character.
Another multiplayer game where the goal is to hunt and kill the elusive Wumpus. In this game the players navigate a text based adventure environment by issuing the classic NORTH, SOUTH, WEST and EAST commands. The player with the most Wumpus kills is the winner.
You can play these games and more from the following links
Congratulations to everyone who took part in the jam, but of course special congratulations to our winners, who get to proudly claim that they are Scotland’s Pick as best of the Game Jam!
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We are back in Glasgow for another IGDA Scotland meet-up. Join us on Wednesday July 25th from 7pm onward at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts.
We have some excellent speakers lined up:
Phil Harris is a long time friend of IGDA Scotland and has worked in the industry for a number of years: Initially as Editor-in-Chief of SquareGo videogame review site and more recently with The Story Mechanics. He is now working on story aspects with Blazing Griffin, as well as providing articles and feedback to a variety of indie developers and press.
Steve Young is Creative Director at WeeWorld in Glasgow, he has spent the last 7 years building WeeWorld.com into one of the world’s leading Social Networks/Virtual Worlds for young teens, predominantly in the US, with over 50 million user accounts created and 2.5 million monthly active users. WeeWorld have recently been featured in a Studio Profile at ScottishGames.net.
I thought 7:03pm was on time – early in fact, making my way up the stairs of a bar in an alleyway just of off of one of Glasgow’s busiest shopping streets. The plastic bags hanging from the telephone wires inspired little confidence in me to believe that anyone would find this place. Ye of little faith…
I was greeted, or more met by over fifty eyes sitting at tables. Turns out that Glasgow’s game developers and creatives aren’t only enthusiastic about their IGDA meets, but also incredibly punctual. No words were said, but you could feel everyone thinking “Yeah, we’ve run out of tables…”
I did managed to grab a chair, and sat in my own humility. scribbling down what is the beginning of this blog post. Indeed, we’ve been able to fill every venue so far (2) to it’s capacity, a sign that people are interested. The energy in the room just gets better and better.
Half an hour in and I got some words with Hazel McKendrick who had made it from Edinburgh.
It’ll be fine. This is probably a health and safety nightmare but we’ll get through it!
More seats were pulled out from the corner. There were a few familiar faces I recognized, Phil Harris was easily identifiable with his Square Go T-Shirt and I even bumped into a couple of my old student mentors from Abertay. Not being a native to Glasgow’s game scene, it was great to see so many fresh faces around.
On with the speakers! Glasgow kicks off our first meeting of talk-centric meetings, where a handful of speakers chat about what they do and what they want to bring to the sector.
Brian McDonald was first up, discussing the issue of Student Led Projects versus Game Jams. Whether you’re a games student or not, the debate is still relevant. What is the best way to stimulate learning and creativity in people. Brian showed off some of this years student work, which some of the audience turned out to be the creators of…
Firstly this is just great because this is on a Thursday night and we have a great excuse for having a drink. It’s even better for me because I get to drink on a school night as well!
As an Abertay student I was impressed with the visual quality of the first year work, and we all got a few laughs from the high-octane hollywood-esque iMovie presentation videos just made for clogging up the arteries of social networks and video sharing sites. Hint Hint…
Back to the idea of Game Jams: they work. Though my university hasn’t directly hosted its own yet, I did take part in one earlier this year for Learning and Teaching Scotland, where I attempted, emphasising on the attempted to create an education game for primary kids with the aid of a school teacher. It was an epic fail, but some of the code I produced in the 24 hours we had, and some of the ideas we tossed around were some of the best I’d ever done. So perhaps your team of friends, co-worker, even your entire workplace could have a shot at doing a Game Jam, or Creative Ideas Jam or similar over the course of a week, and see what projects and ideas you could take forward from it.
Second up we had Deep Pixel’s Simon Quig and Craig Stevenson, who satisfied my lifelong aspiration of sitting in a talk where someone tells me to “Buy Our Book”
Seriously though, Deep Pixel have done some great work in the Unity community, and have now released a new book that aims to teach Unity game development proper. Rather than making you create little demo boxes of spheres performing little physics acts and tricks, which are good on their own but give very little help in creating a proper game, Unity 3 Blueprints helps those wanting to learn Unity create fully functional games, while leaving their lids open for everyone to expand on them to their taste. I’ve fallen for a number of coding books that, yes, teach you how to do things, but in a very niche, sand boxed environment.
Needless to say Deep Pixel’s book is seriously worth looking for anyone wanting to learn how to take that step into Unity.
To top off the evening we had Axis Animation’s Creative Director Stu Aitken to talk about the companies’ origins and it’s relationship with the games industry as an animation studio. With every new slide I kept going “oh, I’ve seen that, that was awesome!” “I’ve got that!” and various other spontaneously thought up phrases. If you weren’t there, you missed out a very good in-depth look on the widely talked about Dead Island trailer, which made me cry (not the talk, the trailer…).
There was much discussion and banter to be had, and even if you weren’t able to attend, fear not! The next IGDA Scotland meeting in Edinburgh is only a month away!*
*(roughly…)
Brian was kind enough to send me links to some of the videos he showed off on Thursday night (great for folk at the back like me) :
Didn’t make the talk? View Brian’s slides on slideshare!
Scottish Game Jam Videos
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