#LEGup Fail Clinic: what we learn when things go wrong

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." So said Samuel Beckett. And one of the defining features of games is that you can fail, and try again. So what can we learn from failure in game development and in games themselves?

-----------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: Speakers announced

We are pleased to announce our three speakers for this event:

John Davison, Studio Syrup. Before he set up Studio Syrup, John was the owner and Creative Director of Kanoti, a multi-platform digital agency that produced games, animations, apps and websites for a variety of clients including Uplifted for Channel 4 education. Despite this success, Kanoti announced that they were closing in February this year. John will tell us what he's learned from this experience.

Annette Mees, co-director of Coney, the London-based theatre company that places the audience at the heart of its performance. Coney blend theatre and game design in a unique and exciting way. But to get to a polished finished production, they go through a long process of testing with their audiences, continually developing based on what goes wrong and what goes right. Annette will share her stories of failed scratch performances and show how they use these to both perfect the production and build an audience.

Alex Warren, software developer at Stack Exchange and director of Text Adventures LTD. Alex will be discussing what he's learned from the 2 years he spent building text adventure creator Quest and running textadventures.co.uk (http://textadventures.co.uk/) full time after quitting his job, the reasons it didn't succeed as a business, and how it has affected how he thinks about work

-----------------------------------------------------

We're looking for members to share some of their stories about failure and what happened next. Have you got a disaster story with some useful lessons to share? A catalogue of errors that you now know never to repeat? We know we have. Perhaps you feel that failure is a actually a good thing and one that you've built into your game development process? If you would like to speak at this LEGup about your experiences of failing, or failing better, please get in touch.

It should be an evening of catharsis and lessons learned, and we can also celebrate LEGup reaching 1000 members in the pub afterwards!