Last week, our Brighton studio’s doors opened up to a lovely group of school children from Bede's Preparatory School who are working towards entering the BAFTA Young Game Designers. This competition encourages 10 to 18 year-olds to design, develop and present new game ideas to the world to kick start their career in games. The school created an extra-curricular programme in the Autumn term to look at game design and work towards entering the competition.
The competition has two categories: Game Concept Award and Game Making Award and the group from Bede’s Preparatory School visited the FuturLab studio for a tour and peek behind the curtain of the industry, and then for a short presentation from our Design Director, Dan Chequer, on ‘How a Game is Made’.
As well as being shown around the studio, the students also had the chance to speak to some of our team who work in different areas of games including QA, Programming, Production and Animation. In QA, our QA Tester briefly explained how playing/testing a game works, the difference between structured and exploratory testing, and how bugs are reported. Meanwhile, in Animation, our Senior 3D Artist showed them how animation works in both games and films, how animation works in Unity and, of course, some funny bugs! For Production, they had a look at how the team supports developers, work on timelines, prioritises resources and the certification process. Our Programmer talked to them about how they interact with QA on bug fixes, as well as the complexity of projects and how everything comes together.
The students had amazing questions for our team that showed some great depth, such as how found bugs were prioritised, how work is delegated to different team members, and how people know who does what within the studio.
We loved having the aspiring game designers here at the studio and it was a great experience showing them how we work and what some of the areas of making games they could get involved with!
Alex Farley, the Head of Faculty for Performing and Creative Arts at the school, said: “the pupils were absolutely buzzing on the bus on the way back to school, and lots are going to amend their game designs before submitting them to the BAFTA competition over half term.” And a parent who accompanied the group said they felt “really inspired” by the trip, and hopefully the children did too!
It was a delight to host the students at our studio, and we wish them all the best for their entries into the BAFTA Young Game Designers Competition, and their futures in the games industry.