I arrived at the Jug and Jester about 10 minutes late (thanks, reliable bus service), whereupon the handing out of free beer tokens commenced and hence the drinking of free beer. After fetching my free beer — you have to get your priorities right — I got talking to a variety of people, including some animation students from Birmingham University, the organiser and some guys from Airplay, who are behind several published games and even received a BAFTA nomination for their first mobile game! Surprisingly, though, out of around 20 – 30 people, there weren’t any other student programmers there. Are we really that rare?
After a while Neil, from Blitz Arcade, took to the stage and gave a short introductory talk. We were going to listen to four different studios, all of which are enrolled in the Blitz 1Up program, which, through their connections to digital distribution sites such as Steam and Direct2Drive, along with in-house resources, aims to give a helping hand to struggling indie games developers. Aside from Airplay, we saw Remode who followed the dream and started their own studio upon graduation and their game ‘Mole Control’, which is a remix of Minesweeper with added cute, furry animals; Binary Tweed (Deejay), who’s also following the dream after quitting his desk-job and porting his XBLA title ‘Clover’, which is this really cool Dizzy-inspired platform puzzler, to PC; and Regolith Games with their game ‘KrissX’.
Once the talks had finished, we had the chance to try out the games for ourselves, get another beer and network some more. I got chatting to a designer from Blitz who’s involved with the open days, and he imparted several pieces of advice, but most importantly: make a game! Games studios want people who have developed a game from start to finish. All of the studios were simply baffled that universities don’t encourage this in their modules. Of course, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to show them what I’ve been working on, Laika.
Laika in its current state
After me babbling on about how it’s not at all revolutionary and that I pretty much spent three days solid developing it in a mad dash before the Blitz open-day hand-in, a few people got to playing it and more watched. To my surprise, it seemed to be generally well received! They seemed to appreciate that I hadn’t tried to be an artist; in fact, I think the exact words were ‘programmer art is great’. I even got some useful criticism and advice about the boss.
Unfortunately, by this time it was getting late in the evening and soon everybody decided that they’d rather be at home with their loved ones so I set off myself to the bus stop, which turned out to be just outside the pub.
