A Student's Game Development Journey & Building An Indie Game Builder

This month's Meetup will focus on different perspectives of gaming development. We have two interesting talks organised for you!

• Topic 1: You Reap what you Sow - A Student's Game Development Journey

Developing video games is a struggle, especially when you’re a team of four students making a fully realised 3D puzzle platformer over a period of 8 weeks. Learn about the roles, processes, tools, testing practises, work structure, and problems that students currently face in the game development process. The talk will be led by the four third-year game development students: Adam, Matt, Philip & Sebastian, with the context of their journey making Reaper Co: a wacky 3rd Person PS2 inspired game where you play as one of deaths lackeys assigned to kill a Hollywood Actor on the set of his latest film. The game has won both the Best Game Award and the People’s Choice Award at the latest UTS Student Game Showcase and has been a passion project for all the people involved.

The four students are in their final year of studying a Bachelor of Science at the University of Technology and have made several digital and physical games individually within the past.

Adam Bursill is a passionate and capable programmer who has several notable achievements to date including, UTS IT Deans merit list 2017, and previous winner of the Student Prototype Exhibition Sep 2017. His current work has seen him develop two programs for Vivid 2018 which made the lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and buildings around Circular Quay interactive to the public.

Sebastian is a skilled programmer and a self-taught 3D modeller & graphic designer who has won several prizes within the past 3 years of UTS Showcases for his Data Visualisation and Role Playing Games. He has previously created serious games for academic research and is currently working on gamifying physiotherapy with Lusio Rehabilitation.

Matthew Andrews is a capable programmer and an aspiring Environmental Artist who has created level designs for a few major university projects, including a 2D platformer, 3D Random Dungeon generator tech demo as well as a 3D platformer.

Philip is an international games development student that is interested in all aspects of games development.

• Topic 2: Building an indie Game Builder (Unity)

Bilal Akil is the founder of Villager, embarking on a journey into the indie game industry. Villager will be a quirky, humorous, yet challenging tower defence style indie game, initially targeting the major mobile platforms. The game will have a lot of content, and Bilal wants to spend time making, tweaking and perfecting that content, instead of getting bogged down by the code behind it. So he invested in designing and building a "game builder" first, that would allow him to quickly prototype, iterate and... build... the game.

But these notoriously suck. They're typically limited to certain types of games, like platformers or top-down tile games, or they make it hard to do something that doesn't naturally fit their model. How would Bilal make it not suck, and provide more freedom than inflexibility, without taking away from the already awesome power of Unity?

Let's explore some of the good/bad game builders out there, and the game requirements we're trying to address, before jumping into the solution for Villager (and future games?). Demo and a bunch of "in the wild" game references included.

• Agenda
5:45pm – Guests arrive and network
6:15pm – Hello and introduction to speakers
6:20pm – Topic 1
6:45pm – Topic 2
7:15pm – Network/closing

This is a free event sponsored by Wargaming Sydney for the community. Some food and drinks are provided. Please RSVP as there are limited spots available and for catering purposes.