Gamecitynights

Gamecitynights are like little teaser nights for the bigger festival game city which is later in the year. during it you get to see multiple different indie developers and learn some things about video game culture. at the leeds  one there were some decent games like go to hell, Dave and dream. most of the games where made by one person or a group of up to 3 people. most of them were made within a  six month period or have been developed slightly longer. all the games were different and had their own quirky little parts to them. during the talks that were held thoughtout the night you were told about a video game canon that got created in 2007 that was made to show 10 games that define what gaming is if the world stopped on that day. below are the games that were put into the canon.

1. Spacewar
2. Star Raiders
3. Zork
4. Tetris
5. SimCity
6. Super Mario Bros. 3
7. Civilization I/II
8. Doom
9. Warcraft series
10. Sensible World of Soccer

the night was also sponsored by edge and simcity which I thought must be good because it must be decent because of the decent backing it is getting from other companies.it was a good night and i would definitely go to another one and the main festival later on in the year. below are the links to the website and to a video to show what it was like during the night. 

In terms of my own work I thought it was interesting when we were told that collaborating is a good thing. Other designers have different skill sets to you so it would be easier, more efficient and a better use of time to get others to say come up with a concept, you model it and you get someone else to animate it.

However, there was another group of people there who were new to designing games and they were learning all the skills individually. Even though they were learning individually they were working in a group and could eventually pool their skills.

Some of these people were graphic designers. Some of these people said they were very much out of their comfort zone. They had maybe played games before but never thought about the construction and making. When they had to do this they realised the effort involved. They pointed out though that there were some similarities with web based graphic designs as they also need to polish and fine tune their projects and iron out any bugs- this applies to both website and games.  

http://nights.gamecity.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1YNkwcEFS8