Grads In Games visit to UCLAN for the Get in the Game Careers Talk Tour

tháng 11 27, 2015 Grads In Games visit to UCLAN for the Get in the Game Careers Talk Tour No comments

Grads In Games visit to UCLAN for the Get in the Game Careers Talk Tour 2015 proved to be a really informative event! #gitg15
Students from both Games Design and Games Development courses flocked into the studio to hear talks by the Grads In Games team guests:

Ben Milnes, Recruitment guru at Aardvark Swift
Lee Stott, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft for talk slides see: Landing your Dream Job
Uclan Alumni, Gavin who also won #SearchForAStar and Stockx from Boss Alien

Their talks helped students to learn what it really takes to make it into such a competitive industry. Covering topics such as:

• Career advice

• Information of how to maximise your chances of securing your first industry role.

• CV, Portfolio and Demo Advice

• Interview Techniques

• Technical and practical knowledge required by studios

• How to increase employability

• Q and A session

This was a great opportunity to gain expert information which could prove vital in our student careers and was worth every minute.

Advice included:

Use 'SketchFab' to showcase 3D work.
Aim to have a playable game published BEFORE you leave Uni.
Keep CV's uncluttered and link them in your online portfolio
Make sure the most important info is visible and accessible in your online portfolio
Include work to show how you have progressed in your online portfolio
For level designs, the modding approach is recommended
Construct 2 from Scirra is great for creating and publishing your games
Games Artists and Designers should make connections with Games Programmers at Uni.to form teams and get collaborate creatively
Get your own business card for networking
Use 'Itchio' to promote your games - Open indie game marketplace and DIY game jam host

Ben Milnes- Aardvark Swift

Boss Alien

Lee Stott- Tech Evangelist at Microsoft

A big turnout from Games students

T Shirts prizes for correctly answered questions :)

Search For A Star Code and Art Competitions

Open to final year & postgraduate students. Grand prize of an interview offer from one of our partner studios.

Open to first- and second-year students. Grand prize of an internship with one of our partner studios.

A national initiative to improve the links between the UK games industry and academia.

Top 3 Open Source Pinball Games

tháng 11 25, 2015 blender, emiliapinball, nova pinball, pinball No comments

The first flipper pinball machine was released 68 years and 1 month ago and yet there is only a handful of open source, cross-platform pinball video games available! Oh well, let's take them for a spin, shall we?

UPDATE Dec 1st, 2015: 1. Added Libre Pinball, see Honorable Mentions below. 2. Added conclusion section.

UPDATE Jul 17th, 2016: Updated Emilia Pinball links

Nexus Pinball

Nova Pinball Gameplay

Started only a month ago, Nova Pinball's simple sole 2D table is a lot of fun and development has made good progress.

Emilia Pinball

Emilia Pinball Gameplay on Five Tables

~~The ancient 3D Emilia Pinball project has a recent fork on GitHub that adds more tables (the last official release had only 2, the new one has 5).~~ The code is the ancient but consistent original SourceForge project and some new tables are flowing around patches/mailing list posts https://sf.net/p/pinball/

The game has 4 perspectives (F5-F8)

The models are very low-poly, which is fine and fast but the textures are sinfully low-resolution. However editing textures appears to be simple in existing tables, simply by overwriting them with higher-resolution files, as demonstrated with the angry gnu head in the screenshot above.

Creating new tables requires an editor, which I unfortunately was not able to compile yet (possibly due to lack of old Qt libraries).

Emilia Pinball Zombie Table Gameplay

There is a zombie/horror/Halloween table, which unfortunately contains non-free content.

Linball

Linball Gameplay

The 2D Linball table is crazy fast but suffers from some sounds ripped from proprietary games (maybe there's more non-free content).

Honorable mentions

Libre Pinball Gameplay

Libre Pinball (thread) is very atmospheric but has no missions and only very few table elements right now. It was made using the Godot Engine.

Sadly, Visual Pinball only runs on Windows (wine page).

Vector Pinball for Android unfortunately has no instructions for desktop/Linux compilation.

Devil's Pinball Buggy Gameplay

Devil's Pinball is a Blender-made pinball table. It's quite buggy when played in recent Blender and there is no license information.

Conclusion

I find the open pinball games on Linux more entertaining than I expected them to be. The major downside is decoration and context: while the themes of some tables are intriguing, they unfortunately exist in a widescreen world without a proper background that adds to the experience.

And of course some accessible (video) documentation on how to create new tables would be a huge plus.

Got theme ideas for open source pinball tables? Write them in the comments!

Uclan Games Design students at the Harris.

tháng 11 13, 2015 Games Design students at the Harris. No comments

Uclan Games design students, Ron Burgess, Shannon Patterson and Adam Mattis were invited to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston by Access and Inclusion Officer Kyra Milnes, along with Fine Artist, Rebecca Chesney and Uclan Fine Art MA students for a special event which offered talks and a portfolio surgery for Preston College students who are preparing for interview for University.

The Harris Gallery proved a very welcoming and inspiring venue for us all and the blend of talks from Fine artists and Games Designers was a good mix, giving insight across the disciplines. It was also good to meet Preston College tutors, Mary and Chris to initiate conversation and we hope to work with them again in similar scenarios.

Uclan Games design students spoke about the work they produced during their own first year of study which helped Preston College students to see the quality of work that is produced on the course and hear a little about the process. This was followed by a portfolio advice session and general chat in a relaxed atmosphere.

Many thanks must go to Kyra for organising the event, which was fun but also informative.
Below are a few images of our Uclan Games students presenting their work and sharing their ideas.

Naev, Valyria Tear, Wyrmsun, ReTux

tháng 11 13, 2015 naev, retux, valyriatear, wyrmsun No comments

Wymrsun 1.6.0 was recently released (announcement on our forums and on Steam). Wyrmsun is inspired by the original Warcraft games and many reviewers on Steam compare it to Warcraft II. The project continues a steady development pace which is always a good sign so I encourage RTS fans to try it out.

Wyrmsum

Naev 0.6.1 has been released. After a long period without releases until release 0.6.0 appeared in March, this follow up release indicates a return to regular progress for the project. Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game.

I couldn't find a more recent video but here's a bit of a development log of some features for the 0.6.0 release.

Speaking of resurgent projects, Valyria Tear has some news.

The most noticeable change is that I killed a few days ago a very nasty bug that was there from the beginning, making the lua threads never freed from memory. This means the game won't end up anymore swallowing gigs of memory for nothing and crash due to some memory overflow.

Well that does sound like a bit of a killjoy, so good to see it fixed. Other changes are in the blog post.

Onto more things slightly more dubiously open source in nature...

ReTux 0.2 has been released. ReTux is a new Super Tux inspired game. It is a completely rewritten (in Python) codebase although uses many of the assets from the original Super Tux so naturally people will mistake the two despite the significant differences. I already covered the IndieGoGo campaign in a previous article.

ReTux

I'm not really on board with the way the developer Onpon4 is now soliciting $20 for access to the code. I think he's both hurting himself by limiting exposure of the game (you need a password to access the downloads) as well as asking for a fairly significant sum in an age where AAA games are of a similar price a year after release (and regularly on offer, as any Humble Bundle or Steam user will know).

I would say he should just get it on Steam, sell it there, and be open source outside of that. Perhaps have additional levels in the Steam version but accept that charging for the source code is as pointless as it is ineffective.

Crosby Game WIP

tháng 11 10, 2015 Crosby Game WIP No comments

http://gamejolt.com/games/kite-shooter/208265

Dan Bavin starts new job at Ninja Theory

tháng 11 06, 2015 Dan Bavin starts new job at Ninja Theory No comments

Some lovely NEWS.

One of our recent Uclan Games Design graduates, Dan Bavin has just completed his first
few months at @NinjaTheory games studios and we've just heard that he's been offered a
job with them in Cambridge.

Really well done and well deserved too. All the best and Congratulations.

Dan was also the winner of the Uclan Creative Focus award 2015
Dan's on-line portfolio can be accessed here

Dan Bavin's Contact details can be found on LinkedIn

Dan's own website is:
http://www.monkeyrocket.co.uk/

A selection of first year project examples from Uclan Games Design.

tháng 11 01, 2015 First year project examples No comments

Sprite design for a top down shooter game

Sprites for the 'Design and build a Top Down Shooter Game in Construct 2' brief

See examples of the Top Down Shooter Games Here:
Link
and Bev Bush's game here

Design and Build a Robot shooter game in Construct 2
Link

Design and build a Platform game in Construct 2
Link

Design and build a 3D Corner in Maya and import into the UE4 engine.