This week’s talk was by Jamie Blacknell. He graduated from the Games Design and Art course in 2021. He made a game called Portage: A Mindful Journey for his final project which contains similar environmental themes to what I am currently working on. It’s a single player exploration game where you wander around a forest with your dog.
He also worked on projects in his own time. He currently works at a company called play360.ai with Game.City, a company that makes games based on licensed TV properties. He went from a generalize role and now has more responsibilities in leading projects.
Jamie emphasises the importance of communication, specially with different groups of people like direct seniors, people from other department or people from the executive branch.
Jamie also talked about the ways of networking with people in the industry, taking part in game jams and challenges and being an active member of the community I’m in. In terms of game jams, I have done many in the past and I’ve also taken part in physical in-person jams such as the Southampton Game Jam and another in 2022 while I was at Solent University alongside the ones I’ve done online. As for speaking to people in the industry, there are several ways I could go about it, for example, game development meetup events, in which I have been to 1 before, and trade show events like EGX.
Finally, Jamie talked about portfolios, and how to put the work that I’ve done already into those portfolios. For example, using GitHub, making your your projects are accessible online, but also creating a release and explaining how the code works. He also suggested using a service like Itch or Steam, and Steam is a service that I would be interested in exploring, potentially with my final year project.