A Scottish Games Industry Fluff Piece

The Consolevania team recently put together a 50-minute long documentary about the scottish games industry. It was shown at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, and is available for torrent here and direct download from various locations found here.

Watch it, its funny and informative. You may see a certain Colin in it for about 5 seconds, actually.  It was rated 18 when shown at the festival, so expect the usual antics!

Advertisement

Wolftactics: A blast from the past

It’s great when you stumble on a bit of your own past, as I did here.

This was my first game project, a modification for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I was Lead User Interface, as well as a level designer. It was great fun, and ended up being a nice total conversion, even if it didn’t last too long popularity wise. We got around 20,000 downloads within 48 hours of release, and (somebody correct me if they know better), we were the first game to feature wave-based parachute spawning! It is a great feeling to see how people had fun with your own creations – one of the reasons for my interest in the games industry.

We even got reviewed in PC Gamer and PC Format, scans following.

Unfortunately the site is not online any more. It is still up on archive.org at wolftactics.com, if anyone is bored.

Racer: Free Racing Simulator

I stumbled upon this about two years ago. Since then it has made steady progress, and it is quite fun – even if you don’t have a wheel and pedals. Mouse control can revolve around quadrants of the screen for acceleration, breaking and steering. It may sound dull/weird here but its a nice way of controlling the car.

There are hundreds of cars and many community developed tracks out there, ranging from in development cityscapes to a fully-fledged version of the Nürburgring.

Go download it. Now!

Game in Scotland 2007

Scotland has a thriving games industry sector with most companies being based in Dundee. For the second year running it was the location for Game in Scotland, a games industry recruitment event run by Interactive Tayside.

Last year I attended the event looking for that jump into the games industry. A month or so later, I had secured a job with a games technology company specialising in one of my main interests. This year I was lucky enough to attend the event in a professional capacity.

The event begins with a free for all. Companies have stalls for showing off products and chatting with attendees. CV’s and demo reels are distributed to companies from those eager to strut their stuff. Something I noticed this year was the amount of animators and artists in attendance. This fits with games now requiring huge amount of assets in these fields as the technology develops; allowing for the intricate detail gamers demand.

I was invited to participate on the panel of two industry question and answer sessions, which were held later in the afternoon. ‘Meet the team’ was the first of these, detailing roles within the industry. One of the questions was how we entered the industry, and I quite happily praised the event – it being my own stepping stone. This was my first public speaking experience, and I was extremely nervous. Hearing my voice over the PA was strange, but as people say confidence grows, yaddy yadda, etc. The second session was on ‘Whats around the corner?’, a discussion on what the future holds for games. A lot of fuss was made over MMORPGs, which I quite honestly don’t care for in the slightest. An interesting point was made about Flash developers being in demand, and that the platform could in fact over the next few years make a leap into the mobile platforms currently dominated by Java.

In all, a great day in Dundee. STV turned up at one point and were filming various areas, but didn’t see anything on the news relating to it (I get the west of Scotland reports). They do have a short piece on their website, however.

Special thanks to Brian Baglow of scottishgames.biz who chaired the second session I was on, and made me laugh with the petition situated at his stand for this particular atrocity.