This weekend Dundee is hosting Dare ProtoPlay, Scotland’s biggest computer games festival. There are fun and games for all ages at the Caird Hall as well as an important insight into a switched-on city which has long been a hub of digital design technology. Jennifer Cosgrove found out more.
At the halfway stage of the competition, local young people were invited to test out the games, helping the teams troubleshoot and discover what worked – and what didn’t.
The prospect terrified the designers. In fact, nothing strikes fear into their hearts more than the thought of children playing their games, but the results proved positive and created a real buzz among the teams.
Over the course of the ProtoPlay festival, the Dare To Be Digital 2011 games will be judged by members of the public and industry experts. Three winning teams will then go on to compete for the exclusive BAFTA Ones To Watch award, which is announced early next year.
In addition to showcasing the brand new games built by the Dare teams, visitors to the festival will be able to try out the latest computer games, watch professional gamers battle it out on high-end Intel machines, learn how to build games and attend a number of educational talks about the industry.
There will also be a games fair outside in the City Square.
As reported in The Courier last month, DC Thomson creator of The Beano, The Dandy and many other memorable comic books teamed up with Dare ProtoPlay to run a comic strip design competition open to entrants aged 13 and below.
All shortlisted entries will be on public display during the three-day festival and the winners chosen by Beano editor Mike Stirling and Dandy editor Craig Graham will be announced at an awards ceremony on Sunday.’Hub of activity’Elaine Russell has been project manager for Dare to be Digital for five years and she says that every year the standard is always very impressive.
“We have a good hub of activity in Dundee we actually have around 15 video games companies here so we want to attract the talent to come and study here,” she explains.
“We also want the people of Dundee to know and be proud of the achievements here. I think, apart from people who work within the sector, other people are not too aware of how good we are.
“Dare ProtoPlay will hopefully make people more aware of how well we have been doing.”
She added, “We also want to take care of the teenagers who are thinking of what to do when they leave school.
“Instead of getting into trouble for playing games, they can earn money out of it because there are good career prospects.
“Companies can come and seek new talent, teenagers can have aspirations, people just come in and get inspired but there is also some serious learning to be done.
“And, if you are really into gaming, we have a professional tournament which sees people travelling from Holland, France, Denmark and Norway to compete.”
Elaine says that “digital literacy” is high in Dundee and the improvement of broadband is important to this development, adding, “It’s really time for Dundee to have a video games festival.
“We had a few successful festivals in Edinburgh as part of the Festival Fringe and thousands of people turned up.
“We are quite established now, so we really hope this first year will be a success and then we can continue to do it.”
It’s the first year that Dare ProtoPlay has taken place outside of Edinburgh, and you can feel the buzz among the gamers of Dundee. For those who work in what seems like the city’s secret industry, it’s long overdue, and they want to shout about what’s being achieved here.
“Dundee is the true heart of Scottish games development and a fantastic place to live and work. The huge wealth of expertise in games development within the city is unparalleled,” says Dan Leyden, technical manager of Dundee games company Cobra Mobile.
“With so many companies producing such high-quality games, Dundee is the natural place for the Dare ProtoPlay event to take place.”
Cobra Mobile is just one member of the Dare Developer Showcase, a collection of leading companies that put their latest games and talent on show to the public at Dare ProtoPlay.
Other big names include Blitz Games Studios, Crytek, Outplay Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
Dare ProtoPlay itself is a free three-day public event organised and run by Abertay University and sponsored by technology corporation Intel. It features a vast range of games-related fun for all ages and abilities, including serious game players and developers.
Abertay has always hosted Dare To Be Digital, a leading video games development competition for undergraduates that sees teams being challenged to design games in a space of less than three months, and which culminates in the Dare ProtoPlay festival.
Historically, the festival has been part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but, in 2011, it is staying in Dundee and will feature all of the games created during this year’s competition.’Dream come true’In June, teams of student programmers and artists were set a challenge to create fully-functioning prototype games in the space of just nine weeks ready for assessment by industry judges and also a public vote during Dare ProtoPlay. The idea is the competition not only showcases emerging talent, the intense experience also helps graduates to build skills for working in the industry.
According to Dan Leyden, he would have “killed” to have been a part of something like Dare ProtoPlay when he was at university.
“It’s an absolute dream come true,” he says. “Some of the work is technically really nice and, from a design point of view, it is really interesting.
There are so many different game types here and some of the art is lovely.
“The fact they have managed to bring all of this together under one project over a matter of weeks is really quite impressive.”
Dan and other members of his company have helped out with mentoring at Dare To Be Digital and have been very impressed by the diverse modes of technology being tackled by the teams.
This year, there are no ‘conventional’ console games, and these have been replaced by designs for mobile phones, iPhones, iPads and XBox Kinect, which is so advanced it uses the movement of the human body as the control.
“You just go round the teams, talk to them, see what they’re doing and see if you can give them any pointers on the direction of their game or what they should concentrate on,” Dan explains.
One of the main aims of the competition is for teams to create a game that is easily accessible so if the user is having fun in 60 seconds, you’ve hit the jackpot.
Dan goes on, “What you find is a lot of the games are overambitious and it’s always a case of trying to reiterate that you shouldn’t do this especially when you’ve only got nine weeks.
“Sometimes the smallest thing can end up taking a lot of time. A game doesn’t have to be incredibly complex to be good. Even the most successful ones, like Tomb Raider, are incredibly simple all you do is jump and shoot, there’s nothing else to it!”
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user Yutaka Tsutano.