So recently I went to EGX Rezzed with my class. EGX Rezzed is a sort of indie game convention for developers to show off their new games, but it has a variety of things, even a few AAA games were there and some universities and smaller developer teams. Here is the website: https://www.egx.net/egx.
The start of it was really good actually, obviously me and my friend Dave had to travel all the way to Shadwell in order to get to where it was held; Tobacco Dock. The whole time I was obsessing with how many street passes I would get on my DS and Dave would call me a mug.
We walked through, Mike and Sophia handed us our wrist bands that granted us entry, and we walked into the first room. We all initially thought that this average-sized room was going to be the whole thing, which was a little disappointing at first, but we soon learnt that it was just one of like 20+ rooms. We had a quick look around, we saw a lot of new games and a lot of games that we already recognised, but there were a few games that we deliberately wanted to play.
Titan Souls was one of them, which I was told would be the closest I’d get to a 2D Dark Souls, and they weren’t really that wrong. It was similar in the sense that it punished you and forced you to learn why you died in order to get better, but the combat was very far from Dark Souls, but that’s understandable considering that it’s limited by the fact that it’s 2-dimensional.
Our teachers then met up with us and then explained that we were there so that we could talk with some of the devleopers about their games, so I decided to talk with some of the developers about a game called “Poncho” – which you can read more about here!
At first I talked with the programmer who told me about how he got into the the indie game scene and how he started to do things. It was quite insightful actually, and I was asking him about some of the art of the game, too. he recommended I talk to their dedicated artist who was standing nearby. I spoke with him for a little while and he told me about how he started out on smaller projects and doing pixel art for free, and basically when he got good enough he started looking for paying jobs doing it.
A little after that we went to a talk on virtual reality by Chet Faliszek from Valve, and he was basically talking about how far virtual reality has come in the last couple of years, and talking about the SteamVR headset which is due to be coming out very soon. It was interesting also hearing about what some of the developers of virtual reality games had to say and what problems they encountered and how they solved those problems. There was also a lot of Chet telling us about the design and testing process for their VR headset and how they tackled various problems, such as the headtracking and positional tracking.
Afterwards I went to a room that was dedicated to careers. I wanted to talk to a few more people about their jobs and how to get jobs within the industry. I talked to a hiring manager at first and he was telling me about what they look for in individual people depending on what they want to do within the industry, for example an animator will be hired based mostly on the quality of their showreel.
Overall it was pretty damn good and I learnt a lot about the industry and how it works. Steve then took us to the pub because he wanted to get us drunk he’s a cool guy.
Mills Art - HND Games Design 