Guest Speaker Notes and what i took away from the talks!!!

Dan Benardo - PlaytraGames

Dan Barnardo a founder/CEO of a small games company called Playtra games came into Campus via Microsoft teams to speak to us about mainly starting your own business and his advice on how to do so as the founder.

He gave us some solid advice such as having a cofounder if you are starting a business so that you have someone to "share the load with" meaning that they can help take some stress off you by being another owner of the business that employees and problems can come too instead of all problems coming to you.

Dan also spoke to us about what he as a small games company founder looks for when hiring new employees into his company and said the following:

no game studios have the same qualities they are looking for
improve your chances by showing your experience with a portfolio
pipelines processes and systems
study how real companies operate
a recommendation is great
ask questions in interviews

Dan's talk helped me put into context what I would need to do if I ever wanted down the line to make/start my games studio as I have imagined before being a CEO of a games studio in my name (Potterygames) this talk by dan has helped me take away a few things on how I would conduct this.

Dan Benardo - Playtra Games reflection

Dan's Benardos talk about his company and employability and what they look for as a company in new potential employees has opened my eyes to what needs to be provided in the application process for a job. I have particularly taken into account as to what Dan said in regards to portfolios when he said to "improve your chances with a portfolio"

What I did in response to what I learnt from Dan

After Dan Benardos lecture was concluded I wanted to create a space to host all of my work from over this course and other pieces like game jam materials and past creative pieces in order to show to potential employers what I am capable off and in order to as Dan said "Increase your chances".

In order to compile all of my Portfolio pieces I used a website called Link tree, which is a freemium social media reference landing page, it is made to provide a landing page for a person or company's entire associated links in social media, which rarely allows linking multiple sites.

Alex Johansson - Game Developer in sheifield

Alex Johansson is an indie game developer who is situated in Sheffield who like most of our guest's talks over this module joined us via Microsoft teams and talk us through his experience and life stories as an indie game developer over the past ten years.

Alex first started by talking about how his career and that of many indie game developers are not smooth sailings as he explained that there were parts in those ten years when he had been on less than minimum wage because the games he had made up until that point had not made enough profit for him through their ads or sales.

Due to this, he stated that he had to get a second part-time job to help pay bills and also required support for housing from the government he told us this to explain/show to us that life as an indie developer is not always smooth sailing and that you may have times where financial struggles come into it, however, for many in the class this awoke us to the harsh realities of the industry we are trying to enter and cause a few, including myself, to panic which is both a good and bad thing.

I see Alex's wake-up to reality in a good way because I feel without it many of us in the class would not have realized how much work we had to do to make it in this industry which forced us all to take a bit more responsibility for our time here at Campus which is running short. However, I do also see him telling us all this in so much detail as a bad thing because personally for me this did cause a lot of panic, and as someone prone to having bad anxiety and panic attacks hearing this almost triggered that response in me.

Furthermore, later in his presentation Alex spoke about making alternative controllers (unique controllers for your game) as a great way of grabbing public interest and engaging your audience with a gameplay experience, they will never forget due to how unique of an experience it is, he spoke about this whilst showing us a game that he designed called "morse" which used an alternative controller that allowed the player to create morse code by tapping the trigger.

This alternative/custom controller section of Johansson's talk interested me and has been making me contemplate whether I want to use the idea of an alternative controller in my game.

Moving on, Johansson also at one point in his presentation used his life experience to give us all some advice to take away and use for the next year whilst we are here still at university and that was:

prepare now if you don't have a degree
teach yourself how to build your games
build alternative controllers
make your safety nets and communities
network beyond games and collaborate
always assume everyone at events is in the industry
its ok to fail you're not alone

I will be taking Alex's advice forward, and using what he has said over this talk as a way to keep myself grounded and as a constant reminder of how much work goes in and needs to be completed to get into this industry and I will defiantly be looking more further into custom controllers as an element of my game design process.

Alex Johannsson - Indie Developer Reflection

When Alex gave us a talk I personally didn't have many ideas for my game that I wanted to make as part of my final major project however after coming up with another idea about defending earths satellites from incoming attacks from enemy nations, which I called satellite defender, I decided to think about how that game idea could use a custom controller.

What I did in response to Alex Johansson's talk

I don't really know much about the process of actually making a custom controller due to Alex not really speaking about the technical elements of doing this as a design choice however I have still made some concepts of what I imagined the controller to look like.

The video on the left was a quick prototype I made using a tissue box and a large Christmas bauble for the custom controller and I know this may seem odd however I made this video to explain how I envision the custom controller to work.

The box is meant to represent the base of the controller as seen in my concept art further up on this page and the bauble is meant to represent the globe part of the controller.

In this prototype I am taking on the role of the player who is rotating the globe with gyroscopic movement capabilities to allow a full 360 degree rotation of the globe until they (me) find a missile that us inbound on a satellite of there's that they are seeing on the gameplay screen (visible in the second concept art image above) and they then press the launch button on the base of the controller to launch their counter missile.

Victor Burgin - British Artist and Writer

This week we were lucky enough to be joined by British artist/writer and narrative critic Victor Burgin, this talk was not exclusive to just us games designers as part of the professional contexts module it was actually open to the fine art degree students as well because as well as a narrative critic Victor is an artist making this a perfect time for our two courses to come together and listen to a very fascinating man.

Burgin had stated to us all that he'd like if we could all give him a presentation on our current work with a maximum of ten minutes of talking time per person. We all took it in turns to talk to victor and to the rest of the people in attendance about our work.

When it got to me, I was the first games design student to talk so I wasn't quite sure as to what Victor expected to hear from us as appose to the art students showing off their work, so I basically talked through my topic of space and the different areas of research that I looked at for this research phase of the development process of our game ideas.

I spoke to victor and the audience about how I had been looking into space debris and how out of all of my research that area interested me the most however, I did verbalize that I wasn't quite sure where I could take this idea in terms of narrative hoping that maybe Burgin could shed some light on good ways to come up with a narrative.

After everyone had spoken Victor had prepared some generic feedback to share with the group on our different presentations. He made some very interesting points for example when he was talking about narrative in general, he said "everyone knows what narrative means but everyone finds it hard to describe" this is a way of him saying that everyone perceives what narrative/story telling is in different ways Victor also went on to say a few more interesting things that I took note off and those are:

"When using words stop and think about what the word actually means, don't look for the meaning look for the use"

"Narrative is everywhere like life itself" "take pictures of a swimming pool for example and it shows a timeline/narrative and if you shuffled those pictures around it would change the meaning"

"What's the specifiacy of what you do? how is your understanding of narrative different to the guy next to you?"

"Think what range of meanings can this have not just in my own meaning but what meaning can it have in this time, in this setting and this society etc.?"

"The viewer can provide their own narrative"

"Don't take technical terms out of context"

"Be careful that what you claim of your work can be validated"

"Look into fiction and books and films etc. and think about how this person has dealt with it"

Victor Burgins talk was very beneficial for me as it helped me think about different meanings of narrative and different ways to take my research to help birth a more interesting and compelling narrative for my game ideas.

Victor Burgin Narrative Talk Reflection

Victors talk was very useful and it was very interesting to be able to explain my ideas to such an experienced person in this field. I took a particular interest in one of the things that Victor said when he was giving everyone his collective feedback and that was when he said "When using words stop and think about what the word actually means, don't look for the meaning look for the use".

This quote was interesting at the time however, after choosing the game idea that I will be taking further for my final major project about Space debris and its effect in relation to the Kessler syndrome which I named "Kessler"

What I did in response to Victor Burgin Feedback

The quote I mentioned above from victor made me think about what the name "Kessler" for my game could also mean in other meanings instead of just in relation to the Kessler syndrome and Donald j. Kessler. I did a search online and found a website which states that Kessler is a famous name for a new-born baby boy and another website that stated that Kessler was the name of a tv show made by the BBC in 1981, which was a huge relief to find because I was worried I would have found some rude or inappropriate other meaning for the word "Kessler" and have to change my games name.

www.babynamespedia.com. (n.d.). Kessler - Meaning of Kessler, What does Kessler mean? [online] Available at: https://www.babynamespedia.com/meaning/Kessler [Accessed 8 Jan. 2023].

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www.definitions.net. (n.d.). What does Kessler mean? [online] Available at: https://www.definitions.net/definition/Kessler [Accessed 8 Jan. 2023].

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Mark Rands - Barclays Eagle Labs

For One of our Professional Context Guest talks we travelled to Southampton to attend a talk at Barclays Eagle Labs Hosted by Mark Rands, who is a lab manager at Barclays Eagle labs which as he calls it is "The home of UK start-ups". Eagle Labs is a subdivision of Barclays Bank who specialize in providing Help and Aid to students, entrepreneur and businesses' in order to help them grow. Rand Introduced us to the layout of the Eagle Lab in Southampton and explained how the Lab runs and how they help small business' to thrive. After a small tour Mark sat us down in the middle of the lab and spoke with us about his and Barclays role in being an accelerator for small companies and/or individuals as well as speaking about his particular interest in the games industry and helping games graduates and members of the games industry to excel in their chosen areas. Rand Spoke for some time about how the Barclays Eagle Labs provide accelerator courses which are paid courses that an individual or small business may purchase in order to get the eagle labs help and how previous games design student have used them as become successful.

Furthermore, Mark Spoke about the importance of networking in any job in any industry as a critical part of either finding a job or expanding a business and spoke to us about how he went to events for business in order to promote the new Barclays eagle lab that had just been built in Portsmouth. Rand also mentioned how due to this networking event he met many people that now use the eagle lab to help their business take off. Mark mentioned the popular networking site LinkedIn as a great way of networking within the professional scene and he mentioned how just posting a picture of his coffee cup managed to grab a response from a lot of people that could be potential customers for the eagle labs to help.

Mark Rands Barclays Eagle Labs Accelerator Talk Reflection

Marks talk has made me question how I want my career to play out with making me question weather I want to try get into the games industry as an employee or maybe make my own small games company with a few people or just myself and maybe use the eagle labs services in order to help me. However, one thing is for sure Rands words on how LinkedIn can be used as a great way for networking have stuck with me and made me want to use the networking site to its fullest potential

What I did in relation to the Barclays Field Trip Talk

With Rands talk being centred around the importance of networking and him heavily advising the use of networking sites such as LinkedIn I decided to update my LinkedIn profile to make it as accurate and up to date as possible, including things like my educational background, volunteering experience and many other categories with information about myself.

Furthermore, I also following Marks advice used LinkedIn to connect with people within my industries of interest those being games design as well as a couple artists and graphical designers, due to my background in A level graphics design, looking at my profile at this point in time I have connected and followed the activities of Forty Three Individuals.

Alongside connecting with industry professionals i also responded to another thing that Rands mentioned that is when he said that using LinkedIn is good however, if you don't post regularly the chances of connecting with people further or getting possible job offers will be less effective. As well as if you have applied for a job and they lets say look you up on the site and find your inactive they may be less likely to employ, so that being said since Marks talk I have been posting interesting professional acts I have been partacting in regularly.

Joel and Megan - Us two games

This week Joel (they/them) from UsTwo Games came in to speak to us they said to us that unfortunately Megan who was meant to be presenting to us with them would not be able to attend so Joel took over. In this talk they spoke about who UsTwo games are and about the processes they use as a company to make games.

They spoke about one of their game sthat they are currently working on and how they had made the main charcter of their game be gender neutral (non - binary) and that having an non binary or gederless charcter allows for the players to easily be able to put themselves in the shoes of the charcter they are playing as.

Furthermore, they spoke about how in that game they used a particular development method for making prototype games which they called "White box games" mainly because they are untextured and use simple game engine or code in order to be able to portray what they are attempting to prototype.

UsTwo games talk reflection

UsTwo games' talk to our class was very interesting and contained a lot of useful information about processes that we could use in the development of our own games especially the white box level games i found that part of the presentation very interesting.

What I did in response to UsTwo games talk

In connection to what UsTwo games said about white box level testing I decided to use an online game maker run by google by the name of "Google doodle" where I used it to make a quick little platformer using the tools the site gave me in order to represent the end of my games main mechanic.

I also took into consideration what Joel said about making a character in a game gender neutral or non - binary in order to for one provide representation for that community, of which their is very little, and also to make it so anyone can imagine themselves in the characters shows which is why i decided to not use pronouns like he or she when referring to my player character as well as not making them sound too masculine in order to keep that gender neutral feel and instead use they/them pronouns for the player character in my game