I was employed by Derby Games Studio (a commercial enterprise of the University of Derby) for a short project earlier this month.
The University has issued a press release about the project.
The Project
Our client, BBC Blast, ran a competition for local school children to design and pitch game concepts. The first stage of the project was to develop prototypes of the two best entries using Game Maker, over three days.
Once the prototypes were completed, the winner was selected and their game was developed for a further two weeks.
The finished product was shown on the Derby city centre big screen on 25th June 2008 and will be published via the BBC Blast website, and the studio’s own website.
My Role(s)
I was hired as the Project Manager, reporting to the Studio Manager, Technical Manager and Art Manager. In the prototype phase (3 days) I managed two teams, each consisting of two programmers and one artist. I also wrote some code to support both teams, such as a class to manage an XInput extension and some vector manuipulation functions (dot product, magnitude etc) which were requested by the teams.
In the final phase (2 weeks) my role changed to include more programming, as well as leading the enlarged team and managing the project.
The final product was a great success (described as ‘awesome’ by a number of players) and more importantly the client was very happy.
My contract was also extended to help in providing three game development workshops for young people during the BBC Blast on Tour (Derby) event.
My Credits
Project Manager
Programmer
Music
Gameplay Video
Additional Info
As well as my own postmortem on the project, one of the other team members has written about the project.
