(Note: I wrote this post once and then hit refresh by accident. Arghh.)

So, earlier this year I was accepted as part of team Apey Eyes (great name, I know) on to Dare to be Digital 2011 to make our game idea PaperQuest. The long and the short of it is, it’s a Kinect controlled PC game where you control a paper-and-balloon airship made by magical origami people who want to reassemble their scattered diorama home. You do so by twisting and turning, flapping your arms and punching forward to boost. It was great fun to make and was my introduction to concepts such as per pixel graphics and shading languages, managing audio buffers and memory usage, designing fun into games, and collaborative game making in general (thankyou Tortoise SVN!) 

So the competition is held in Dundee and is a super intensive 9 weeks of from-scratch development to a playable demo stage, then you take it to Dare Protoplay where members of the public get to play it, only two days after you finish making it! It was mentally and physically exhausting and was probably the most work I’ve ever done in my life.

But it was so worth it.

I met so many people who I know I’ll stay in contact with like forever, and learnt so much both from the process and from industry mentors who came from companies like Rockstar, Jagex, Codemasters and Crytek (almost a who’s who of UK games devs). Most of all though I’m so proud of what we all achieved. 

Anyway here are links to PaperQuest’s Trailer, the Dare 2011 Documentary (which I feature in a few times!) and my portfolio where there are a couple of nice screenshots.

Thanks! Next time, what I’m doing now.

Hey everyone, I’m Jay, and this is a cheeky little record of all the computer games projects that I’m a part of.

I’ve been a student at City University studying an MSc in Computer Games Technology since September 2010 and I’m now doing my dissertation project on 3D rendering and audio, for a commercial client that my NDA doesn’t let me talk about. Oops, I’ve said too much.

The first game I ever programmed is an iPhone tap shooting game called Spooky Forest, and it’s on the App Store for y’all to download and play. It’s a fun concept (if I do say so myself) and it’s how I taught myself to program both Objective-C and the OpenGL ES 1.1 fixed function pipeline stuff. Unfortunately I didn’t get much time to develop the gameplay since we only had three months to complete the project, and I haven’t revisited it since I uploaded it to the app store. I have many ideas, however, and I know a few people who want to help me make a sequel. So that could be a way forward!

The next period of time at uni was spent learning various graphics, audio and physics APIs and their concepts, so no actual games came out of it. However, all the stuff I programmed in that period is shown off on this showreel along with some lovely tunes that I wrote myself (The ones in the middle are actually interactive music programmed with FMOD.)

As this was going on, applications were being sent and interviews were being held… and low and behold, I was accepted with a team of lovely people also from City University London into Dare to be Digital 2011 to make our Kinect game idea, PaperQuest! It was an amazing and exhausting time and I learnt the most I’ve ever learnt in three months from that competition. 

More about PaperQuest next time I take a few minutes out of my terribly full dissertation writing and job application schedule!