Sorry about the caps

For those of you enjoying the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, you will be pleased to know the folks over at Beyond the Red Line have released a demo of the eagerly awaited Freespace 2 total conversion.

It’s free, does not actually require you own Freespace 2 due to its use of an open source port, and from my initial few games looks very polished. After playing it more I may post an in depth review, we will just have to see…

Scotland has a thriving games industry sector with most companies being based in Dundee. For the second year running it was the location for Game in Scotland, a games industry recruitment event run by Interactive Tayside.

Last year I attended the event looking for that jump into the games industry. A month or so later, I had secured a job with a games technology company specialising in one of my main interests. This year I was lucky enough to attend the event in a professional capacity.

The event begins with a free for all. Companies have stalls for showing off products and chatting with attendees. CV’s and demo reels are distributed to companies from those eager to strut their stuff. Something I noticed this year was the amount of animators and artists in attendance. This fits with games now requiring huge amount of assets in these fields as the technology develops; allowing for the intricate detail gamers demand.

I was invited to participate on the panel of two industry question and answer sessions, which were held later in the afternoon. ‘Meet the team’ was the first of these, detailing roles within the industry. One of the questions was how we entered the industry, and I quite happily praised the event - it being my own stepping stone. This was my first public speaking experience, and I was extremely nervous. Hearing my voice over the PA was strange, but as people say confidence grows, yaddy yadda, etc. The second session was on ‘Whats around the corner?’, a discussion on what the future holds for games. A lot of fuss was made over MMORPGs, which I quite honestly don’t care for in the slightest. An interesting point was made about Flash developers being in demand, and that the platform could in fact over the next few years make a leap into the mobile platforms currently dominated by Java.

In all, a great day in Dundee. STV turned up at one point and were filming various areas, but didn’t see anything on the news relating to it (I get the west of Scotland reports). They do have a short piece on their website, however.

Special thanks to Brian Baglow of scottishgames.biz who chaired the second session I was on, and made me laugh with the petition situated at his stand for this particular atrocity.

This is a quick first post for my new blog. The plan is to take this one seriously, and fill it with thoughts/experiences in the gaming and programming fields, although I may stray from time to time.

In the next couple of days, I shall be tinkering with layout, style, and other miscellaneous things.

Thanks to Robert for helping pick a blog name, I think it is pretty cool!