Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2015 i Edge

In this line of work, we’re asked lots of questions, some of them repeatedly. Such as: what’s it like to sit around playing videogames all day and call it a job? And: how do I get started in the videogame industry? Also: that guy who wanted to be able to talk to the monsters in Doom – have you checked in with him lately to see if he’s all right? Another common question: who are Edge readers? People ask this because it helps them decide whether or not they should be trying to talk to our audience through these pages, but breaking it down into tidy demographics isn’t easy. Some Edge readers make videogames, some want to make videogames, some don’t. Some readers are teenaged, some are in their 50s…

A sense of humour certainly helps in an industry as unpredictable as this one. Ahead of his talk at this year’s Develop conference, in which he’s set to discuss his company’s history, Relentless Software CEO Andrew Eades jokes with self-effacing modesty that “you can probably compress it into: ‘We made Buzz.’” And yet there’s far more to a studio that’s survived a decade in gaming’s turbulent waters. We talk to Eades to find out how Relentless has adapted to the industry’s evolution. Buzz is a major part of your history, but it wasn’t an immediate success, was it? I’ve got my own theories on this – and I’m sure Sony marketing would say something different – but we designed the first Buzz game with Christmas Day very much in mind.…

Illustration marshdavies.com By the time you read this column, the outcome of the giant social game of lying and posturing called ‘the General Election’ will be known, and another fiveyear social game of lying and posturing called ‘a Parliament’ will have begun. Heaven forfend, though, that I sound too cynical. There were some bright moments in the campaign, none more so than when Ed Miliband appeared on Absolute Radio and said he enjoyed playing Manic Miner as a child. It’s a pleasing sign of the times. Once, such a confession would have marked a politician out as a weird geek. Now just the opposite: it made Miliband seem reassuringly normal. Weird would be a fortysomething without fond memories of playing games. The choice of Manic Miner, of course, was brilliant.…

They say you should be careful what you wish for. On the evidence of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (p38), they’re right. A Victorian London setting has long been rumoured for Ubisoft’s cash-cow-in-chief, and has always been appealing; our first look at Syndicate, however, has proved a little deflating. Perhaps it’s because of the bad taste left by AC: Unity, or simply that the series template has lost its shine through repeated use. Maybe, in a year that has already seen the release of The Order: 1886 and Bloodborne, this once-novel setting has grown stale. In fact, we suspect it’s born of a different kind of familiarity: we just know the place too well. When Connor Kenway walks down a central street in Assassin’s Creed III’s Revolutionary-era Boston, we simply accept that’s…

Publisher Activision Developer Robomodo, Disruptive Games Format 360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2015 Yup, still got it. Within seconds of picking up the pad, we’ve launched into a perfectly angled wallride, ollied out of the peak of its arc and landed into a tailslide on the ledge at the top, kickflipped straight out of that and landed into another grind. Our thumbs and index fingers cycle instinctively through the movelist – flip, grind, grab, grind – as we scan the periphery for the next stop on our combo line. Longdormant synapses crackle back into life as we input the up-down command for a manual as a combo safety net, insurance for our hitting terra firma instead of a handrail. It’s been too long, but no matter. This…

Publisher Square Enix Developer United Front Games, Square Enix London Format PC Origin Canada, UK Release 2015 Hong Kong’s gangsters show quite the lack of imagination. Whichever faction they belong to and wherever they set up shop, every one of the city’s ne’er-do-wells follows the same interior design rules for their safehouse. There’s a lobby with some sofas, chairs and burly badasses; upstairs is an open-plan living area with more loitering goons, and an enforcer kicking his heels on the balcony. They all have the same temple garden, and beyond that lies an industrial estate housing their various criminal rackets: counterfeiting, cock-fighting, hacking and so on. This is a work in progress, of course, and the closed-beta label does much to excuse the copy-pasting of the local set dressing. But…

Game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Publisher Square Enix Developer Eidos Montreal Origin Canada Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release TBC Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is the title of the sequel to 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but it’s also an unfortunately neat summing up of the effect of the binary, potentially progress-stomping bottleneck that was its forebear’s first boss. Anyone who opted for an aggressive, well-armed Adam Jensen had little trouble with killing machine Barrett, but pacifists who made their way to the same point using vents and shadows were forced into a situation that many couldn’t overcome. It was hardly in keeping with the series’ spirit of freeform decision making and self expression. Eidos Montreal addressed the cracks in the Director’s Cut edition, bolting on new ways to kill…

Format PlayStation Publisher SCE Developer NanaOn-Sha Origin Japan Debut 1999 Vib-Ribbon, a rhythm-matching game in which a bipedal, starry-eyed rabbit struts along a trembling white ribbon against a perfectly black screen, is one of the most distinctive games of the PlayStation era. Its scratchy starkness recalls vector-based games such as Asteroids, an aesthetic that was wholly incongruous at a time when most Japanese developers were exploring the far reaches of PlayStation’s millions-strong colour palette. But Vib-Ribbon’s black-and-white minimalist style was one dictated not by creative direction so much as technological constraint. Three years earlier, Masaya Matsuura had invented rhythm-action with his Sesame Street-esque hiphop adventure PaRappa The Rapper. Despite following that up with the rock-based UmJammer Lammy in early 1999, he had grown tired of requests from fans to see…

Publicly traded publishers have an obligation to deliver the maximum possible profit to shareholders. At one end of the budgetary spectrum, this means spending big on a lavishly produced game aimed at a wide audience. At the other, a free-to-play game designed to reel in, and retain, as large a group as possible. The simulator fits in nowhere on this scale. That’s not stopped big companies from trying, but a style of game where accuracy trumps spectacle is a hard sell. It’s all risk, with little prospect of reward. For the big publishers, at least. Crowdfunding has proved that long-forgotten genres retain their appeal and can still be financially viable. Slightly Mad Studios has made Project Cars (p106) with the help of 80,000 players who want a full-blown racing sim.…

Publisher/developer Squad Format PC Release Out now Kerbal Space Program is a game about going up and only getting so far. This is a comfortable template for a videogame, one that maps success and failure along a readily understandable axis – altitude – and hands the player a broad set of powers with which to push that number higher, higher and higher. It could, and does, work simply as a puzzle game, but KSP offers more than that. This is a rare example of a simulation-driven sandbox that operates equally as a game, as a creative construction tool, and as a thought-provoking encounter with history. You are put in charge of a space agency on an Earth-like planet called Kerbin, populated by grinning green Kerbals whose only desire is to…

Publisher/developer Ronimo Games Format Wii U Release Out now The role of a story mode in most realtime strategy games is to educate. It should teach you the idiosyncrasies of each playable faction, the nuances of each unit and the art of combining them skilfully, plus how to carefully regulate your limited pool of resources, all in order to prepare you for battle against another human. It’s a tutorial, in other words, and Swords & Soldiers II has one of the genre’s very best. Its generous and varied campaign allows you to control units from all three sides, beginning with the Vikings, the game’s de facto heroes, before moving on to the Persians and Demons. The double-crossing plot line is amusingly silly, the flimsy narrative centred on a mystical lamp…

Publisher Ignition Entertainment (US), Rising Star Games (EU) Developer Access Games Format 360, PS3 Release 2010 Five years since it careened onto the market, accepted wisdom still has it that Deadly Premonition is ‘so bad it’s good’. It’s the kind of appraisal that catches on easily, particularly for niche or cult works, and so the game is now recognised as such among those who haven’t played it. It also happens to be almost entirely incorrect, a lazy shorthand that doesn’t come anywhere close to untangling the idiosyncratic appeal of this fascinating, bizarre game. Nonetheless, it’s a phrase that’s haunted Deadly Premonition since it was first released to the press. Its wildly divergent early appraisals were responsible for it earning a Guinness World Record for Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror Game,…

Location London, UK JUSTIN PARSLER Senior lecturer www.brunel.ac.uk Currently playing: Cities: Skylines, Gauntlet, Darkest Dungeon, Victoria II, The Forest, The Sims 3 and Sunless Sea INDUSTRY ADVICE “Get a games education or training, but make sure you get the right one for you. There are a lot of courses around, many with similar names that have radically different content. Investigate any course you might take thoroughly; find out what you will learn and find out who will be teaching it. Make sure any such course is accredited by an institution or body that can vouch for its quality, and [that it] teaches to your interests.” Brunel University London is enthusiastic about teaching game design, ensuring that its course, while taking in technical aspects, brings creativity to the fore. The team…

Location Falmouth, UK RICH BARHAM Senior lecturer www.falmouth.ac.uk Currently playing: FIFA 15, Middleearth: Shadow Of Mordor, World Of Warcraft, War Thunder and Game Of Thrones INDUSTRY ADVICE “Learn how to work with others. If you can’t, then you will experience massive difficulties unless you want to make games solo. That means being able to mediate, be diplomatic and compromise as well as swallowing that all-too-present pride that we can sometimes suffer from!” Having served as a director at Zenimax Online, Riot Studios and Io-Interactive, senior lecturer in Digital Games Rich Barham’s CV features a dazzling list of credits that includes World Of Warcraft, League Of Legends, The Elder Scrolls Online and Hitman. He continues to be active in the industry he teaches about, too: he’s currently the CEO of Octopus…

Location Sunderland, UK ANDREW RICHARDSON & CHRIS KNOWLES Programme leaders www.sunderland.ac.uk Currently playing: AR Two Dots and Crossy Road. CK GTAV, Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Lord Of The Rings Online INDUSTRY ADVICE AR “Make stuff. Start making games, be creative, and learn how to use tools like Unity and GameMaker.” CK “Be prepared to work with others and to network. Making links is so important in this industry.” Andrew Richardson and Chris Knowles are programme leaders for, respectively, BA (Hons) Game and App Design and BSc (Hons) Games Software Development. Both have varied CVs, Richardson having created and exhibited interactive artwork internationally, while Knowles is an experienced software developer. Here, they explain the broad reach of Sunderland’s offering. What courses can be studied at Sunderland University? Andrew Richardson We offer…

Remember when you learned a trade and had a job for life? Of course you don’t. It was years ago. As a society, we’re all supposed to be fluid, dynamic and upwardly versatile nowadays. Which is another way of saying that whatever we do, we’ll probably be made redundant in a bit, so keep a sturdy cardboard box handy and don’t scatter too many personal effects around your desk. The videogame industry has always been one where rapid changes of circumstance and personnel are the norm. If someone has maintained employment for more than six years in one place, other developers will queue to see them at lunchtime like people at the zoo. And because entertainment software development is a young person’s game, only once in my life have I…

Apple Watch is easy to dismiss as a gaming platform, especially when you have one strapped to your wrist. Even the larger model’s screen is tiny, and since Apple would rather you didn’t use it at all (thereby keeping the battery alive for a bit longer), the screen blinks off at every available opportunity. The device is mostly silent, bar emitting a shrill ding whenever a notification arrives. And the limitations of the hardware and software result in games – in reality extensions of iPhone apps – that are very basic, with animation that ranges between the staccato jerk of classic Game & Watch and an animated GIF. You might nonetheless think history’s repeating itself, and Apple Watch should be given a chance. After all, the first iPhone was underpowered…

WEBSITE Zelda live map jadsdsengine.com/zeldalivemap.htm A group of developers are recreating locations from The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past in-browser, using Javascript animator JADSDS. Swooping across the live Light World map with no restrictions as NPCs go about their business is curiously empowering, and the wider field of view provides insight into the construction of the world. Since it uses HTML5, you can reminisce on all sorts of devices, and if you’re interested in the tech, the site includes documentation on the code that powers each scene. Along with the Light World, you can also visit the more modestly sized Zora’s Domain, while the Playground section of the website includes a selection of animations from the likes of Street Fighter and Mario alongside editable code that lets…

Illustration marshdavies.com By now, I should have learned to be surprised by nothing, but the genre name ‘toys-to-life’ still startled me. And not because it’s new, either. It’s the name given to game-and-toy lines such as Skylanders, which inaugurated the segment, along with its follow-ups, including Disney Infinity, Amiibo and Lego Dimensions. The premise is straightforward enough: there’s a game that interfaces with physical toys by means of a reader. Skylanders toys use embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags so the game can read them when placed on a peripheral ‘portal’. Amiibo take advantage of the Wii U GamePad’s near-field communication (NFC) capability instead. Once connected, the game identifies the specific character figure and makes use of it somehow. What that means depends on the title. In Skylanders, figurines become playable…

Publisher Ubisoft Developer In-house (Quebec) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release October 23 (PS4, Xbox One), Autumn (PC) Social concerns once again underpin the unveiling of a new Assassin’s Creed as an impassioned narrator helps set the scene. This time, it’s 1868, right at the fag end of the Industrial Revolution. Our guide highlights the crimes of wealth and power, and firmly plants the Assassins in the camp of the underprivileged. Then he tells us that a quite different revolution is imminent; “A blaze from the ashes of an old brotherhood,” in fact. As clearly as this is meant to define the Assassins’ new mission – of twin leads teaming up with a city’s criminal underworld to overthrow the Templars – it could equally apply to the game…

Publisher Nintendo Developer Koei Tecmo Format Wii U Origin Japan Release Out now (Japan), TBA 2015 (EU/US) Finally, the GamePad assumes the role for which it had always seemed ideally suited. We’ve been waiting for it to happen since Nintendo acquired co-ownership of Tecmo Koei’s horror series, but at last Wii U’s idiosyncratic, unwieldy controller can become the idiosyncratic, unwieldy Camera Obscura. It controls as you would hope: you press a button and look through your viewfinder on the GamePad’s display, turning to aim at malevolent spirits and tilting when necessary to get more of the ghost in the frame. Then it’s a case of maintaining your composure, waiting for the perfect shot, before squeezing the right trigger. A few flashes later, and the exorcism is complete. In practice, of…

Publisher/developer Kobojo Format Android, iOS, Vita Origin France, Japan, UK Release 2015 We don’t typically associate Scotland with roleplaying games. Yes, the capital boasts a proud development lineage, what with playing home to Rockstar North and the cultural and sales phenomenon that is GTA. But the coastal city of Dundee acting as a crucial base for a JRPG/MMOG handheld hybrid? That’s new. Yet French developer Kobojo recently established a tight clutch of 24 coders and artists in the city, an expansion made to help it aggressively pursue high-end production values. That new team is now hard at work on a persistent online RPG of quite daunting scope, aiming for a world the size of a Final Fantasy for players to quest together in. Currently known by the working title Zodiac,…

On the face of it, Nintendo wouldn’t appear to have much in common with KnapNok Games: one, after all, is an industry giant with a turnover in the multi-billions, while the other is a tiny independent developer based in the Danish capital. Yet the fact that the two enjoy a very healthy working relationship shouldn’t come as a surprise. Formed within the Copenhagen Game Collective, a community that has been creating experimental games since 2008, the studio has always had a preference for tactile, physical play and unorthodox control schemes. Wii U, then, has become a very natural home for its inventive, exploratory output. You could argue that not even Nintendo has tapped the potential of the GamePad quite as well as KnapNok. Lau Korsgaard, the studio’s creative director, says…

Publisher/developer CD Projekt Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One Release Out now Come on, CD Projekt, not all of us are blessed with superpowers. Geralt Of Rivia may be able to track man, beast and ghost across the Northern Kingdoms with his Witcher Senses – picking up their scents and blood trails, following in their footsteps – but even he would struggle to identify the tiny text and icons on his new game’s UI. Few things betray a PC developer unaccustomed to the needs of the console player quite like an unscaled interface, and so it proves here, with menus and flavour text designed to be viewed from 18 inches presented as-is to those sitting ten feet from the screen. The Witcher? The Squinter, more like. In fairness, CD…

Publisher Brace Yourself Games, Klei Entertainment Developer Brace Yourself Games Format PC Release Out now There’s a dark magician buried deep within Brace Yourself’s rhythm-action dungeon crawler, but it’s not the one immortalised in the logo. No, his name is Danny Baranowsky and his synth-drenched musicality is the pacemaker strapped to the pulsing heart of Crypt Of The Necrodancer. Across four varied zones of procedurally generated dungeon, you’ll hear him exhume myriad musical styles – heavy rock riffs collide with twinkling electronica, chilled club floor anthems give way to cochlea-rattling bass – while the relentless beat drives you ever onwards. The game his music animates is no less entrancing. You’ll start as Cadence, a determined hero whose heart has been plucked from her in a bizarre ritual, and so who…

Location London, UK CHRIS CHILD Lecturer www.city.ac.uk Currently playing: International Cricket Captain and The Last Of Us INDUSTRY ADVICE “You should develop games as a hobby as well as during the degree. We can teach you the skills you need to become an outstanding programmer, but the passion and creativity has to come from you. It’s a fun job and you should have fun doing it.” At first glance, cricket and programming don’t seem to have much in common. But both require a head for numbers – something Dr Chris Child, who’s an expert in both fields, certainly has. Child has been a lecturer in game technology since 2005, the same year he founded his own studio, Childish Things, which now develops the International Cricket Captain series. Prior to that,…

On April 23, yet another limb was grafted onto Steam’s knotty torso, allowing Skyrim modders to charge for their work. To Valve, the move might have seemed like the logical extension of a community marketplace that makes barons of the designers talented, and to some extent lucky, enough to trade in cosmetics for Team Fortress, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike. Of course, it blew up instantly and spectacularly as Steam users revolted against the change, publicly underlining the extent to which the storefront owner’s once-impeccable reputation has become tarnished. Valve’s development process has always been to boot ideas into the world and see which stick. Many do. The studio is an exceptional game developer, and the legacy of its most inspired creations is still felt in the parroted ‘Half-Life 3 confirmed’…

Kid Ink (AKA Brian Todd Collins) began his full-time music career at 22. Since 2012, he’s consistently hit the upper echelons of the Billboard 200 chart, reaching the top 20 with debut album Up & Away. His third album Full Speed charted in the UK Top 10 upon release in February. He will play the Wireless Festival in London on June 28, with a full UK tour in October. Here, the rapper talks playing to psyche himself up for recording, and tattoo death moves. What kicked off your interest in games? I’ve been playing since I was five years old. Super Mario, Street Fighter, Sega and Nintendo took up a lot of my time as I was growing up. I was always competitive and games appealed to that side of…

Issue 280 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL, supplied by the Nintendo UK store Image problem We all do it – men and women. We flick through a magazine checking out what pleases and displeases our eyes. Only then do we add in textual information, hoping for it to validate or contextualise those judgments. “Wow. That’s impressive for a mobile game.” Screenshots in videogame magazines have always had a big influence on the games and platforms we consider buying. And leafing through Edge, it’s always been easy to recognise – from a single screenshot – what platform a game is running on. But recently, it’s become hard even to recognise the generation of…

Illustration marshdavies.com About a week or so afterwards, I think I’ve just about come to terms with the outcome of the UK election. Like a review of a terribly overlong JRPG, I can’t say I enjoyed the process, and the ending left me deeply resentful of the countless, ultimately pointless hours of hot air that had preceded it, but there was at least a sense of relief that it was all over. The whole thing really dragged towards the end, and I felt pretty sorry for the press that had to cover it. One of the broadsheets ran a live blog on its website a couple of days before polling day; one of the party leaders had just walked off a stage somewhere and the writer admitted that, after all…

Publisher Activision Developer Treyarch Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release November 6 The big question at the beginning of development for every Call Of Duty must surely be: how different do we make this? Fans of the billion-dollar FPS have been trained to expect certain commonalities: 60fps action that jump-cuts between claustrophobic choke points and explosive cinematics; lightning-paced multiplayer; and a swift, regular rollout of DLC. COD is effectively the gamification of ADHD. Treyarch’s Black Ops branch has always played with series conventions, at least, putting players in control not of righteous marines, but paranoid CIA operatives fighting deniable battles amid reimagined real-world faceoffs. With Black Ops III, the studio is sticking with the theme of complex, belowthe-line operations, but shifting ahead to 2060. Now there are two…

Publisher/developer Frozenbyte Format PC Origin Finland Release 2015 Trine 3 breaks with series tradition in a number of surprising ways, but one aspect that has remained comfortingly familiar is Frozenbyte’s spectrum-defying insistence on finding even more colours to cram into each sequel. The game’s stylised fantasy locations are even more detailed than before, presented as a rich haze of fantasy clichés that are rendered with such skill and passion that they somehow feel fresh again. The prospect of reaching each new vista remains a real draw, but Trine 3 goes further by allowing you to step into them, too. You’re no longer restricted to a narrow horizontal plane, and levels now twist and contort as you switch from traditional side-scrolling to intothe-screen hang-gliding and all manner of gradients in between.…

In today’s climate of ten-year console cycles and annualised sequels, it’s hard to grasp the sheer density of change that the videogame experienced in the 1980s. Platforms would come and go in a matter of a couple of years, game genres would be founded, explored and built upon across just a few months. Fortunes were made and lost in the breathless rush of the early British game industry – and most extraordinary was that the greatest creative leaps were often made by teenagers. With platforms such as the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, a generation of young game makers suddenly had the tools to create worlds. Their stories are captured in Britsoft: An Oral History, a forthcoming book featuring interviews with leading figures from the formative British videogame…

STILL PLAYING Dark Souls II: Scholar Of The First Sin PS4 Making the player’s life easy is hardly central to FromSoftware’s design ethos, but that doesn’t always mean opening a booby-trapped chest or being slung into a dirty sack: this month we tried to set up DSII co-op with friends. Even with Soul Levels calibrated and Name-Engraved Rings set to the same god, making contact in the game still proved to be a boss-sized challenge. Perhaps we’re destined to play only with strangers for the rest of eternity. Hearthstone: Heroes Of Warcraft, iOS Blizzard’s card battler thuds onto iPhone, becoming our go-to balm for night-time interruptions from the lungs of the youngest of the Edge brood by filling the waits while they resettle. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, or the…

When we speak to senior gameplay designer Damien Monnier and senior quest designer Pawel Sasko, it’s the day of The Witcher III’s release. There’s no sound of popping champagne corks in the background, however; the game may be out in the wild now, but the team is hard at work on its DLC and monitoring forums for launch-day technical issues. Here, we discuss the philosophies and design decisions behind the creation of a remarkable open world. “We wanted to reflect a bit of the uncertainty in life. We don’t always know how our choices will affect our lives” What’s the secret to making a believable world? Damien Monnier The first thing we did was create a Living World team to work closely with the Location guys. Location started by creating…

Publisher Bandai Namco Developer Slightly Mad Studios Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One, Wii U Release Out now Developers so often talk about the cars in their games handling the way you want them to, rather than the way they really would if you threw them at a stretch of Californian highway with videogame abandon. Slightly Mad Studios faces that same delicate compromise with rigorous, full-blooded motorsport sim Project Cars – creating an entertaining impression of its vehicles, rather than a forensic recreation of their physical properties – but make no mistake, there’s no menu-option alchemy to turn this into an arcade racer. This is a game for those familiar with toe-in angles, and who know the braking points of many international circuits by rote. In fact, it’s a…

Publisher/developer Klei Entertainment Format PC (version tested), PS4 Release Out now (PC), TBA What is it about breaking rules that we find so beguiling? What shard of the human spirit is it that wants to plant two feet and stick the same number of fingers up at the system? Whatever it is, clandestine agency Invisible, Inc has given in to the temptation often. Which is why, in the opening seconds of an incandescent campaign, the megacorps that rule this noirish cyberpunk world join forces to eradicate you from the face of the Earth. Driven from your home with naught but a shuttle, just two agents not either dead or captured, and a fastdegrading but ludicrously potent AI called Incognita, you have 72 hours of backup power to find a way…

Location Dundee, UK GREGOR WHITE Director of academic enterprise www.abertay.ac.uk Currently playing: Mutiny, Monstrum, Glitchspace and Seek INDUSTRY ADVICE “Make sure your skills are relevant and up to date, and get on with making great games!” A bertay University’s annual Dare To Be Digital competition might get most of the column inches, but the university’s innovative approach to learning doesn’t end there. Professor Gregor White, who teaches innovation and professional development at a postgraduate level in the university’s School Of Arts, Media And Computer Games, explains how the spirit of its famous game competition permeates everything the school does. Abertay has a wide range of courses. What’s on offer? For undergraduates, there’s our BA (Hons) in Computer Arts, BSc (Hons) in Computer Game Applications Development, BSc (Hons) in Computer Games…

Location Beaconsfield, UK JON WEINBREN Head of games www.nfts-games.com Currently playing: Life Is Strange, Never Alone and This War Of Mine INDUSTRY ADVICE “Videogames are a set of dialogues: between game and player; between the technical and the creative; between the arts and the sciences. They are still relatively new as a medium of creative expression, so if you want to make the most of the opportunity they offer, you must be prepared to facilitate those dialogues, which means you need to bridge the arts-science divide and to be as lucidly creative as you are technically adroit.” The National Film And Television School’s game design MA only accepted its first applicants in 2012, but has rapidly established itself as an influential course. Heading it up is Jon Weinbren, who has…

Location Breda, Netherlands MATA HAGGIS Professor of creative and entertainment games www.nhtv.nl Currently playing: Destiny, Valiant Hearts, Monument Valley, Picross, and The Room 1 and 2 INDUSTRY ADVICE “Finish your small projects and share them – you are the only person stopping yourself from releasing games. The more games that you share, the faster you are going to learn what works and what doesn’t, and this is a key part of our craft. If you get to the interview stage, demonstrating your skills with something small and well-crafted will make you stand out.” Dr Mata Haggis joined NHTV as a senior lecturer in 2010, and has 15 years’ experience in the digital entertainment industry – seven of which were spent running his own game company. At the moment, he’s collaborating…

Location Bournemouth, UK CHRISTOS GATZIDIS Principal academic www.bournemouth.ac.uk Currently playing: CSR Racing INDUSTRY ADVICE “Dedication, personal initiative and passion are paramount to breaking into the industry. You need to be spending time outside of the course refining your portfolio, but also networking with key people. You are, after all, competing with not just the students on the same course, but also nationally and internationally.” Dr Christos Gatzidis is a principal academic in Creative Technology at Bournemouth University’s Faculty Of Science And Technology. He has also contributed to a number of journals and books, including the UDK iOS Game Development Beginner’s Guide. Here, he takes the time to lay out Bournemouth University’s mission. What courses are you offering? At the Faculty Of Science And Technology and within the Creative Technology Department,…