I got yet another email from Burnside High’s pesky technology teacher Steven Rodkiss a month or so ago asking us to ‘help the kids’ again the other day. I tell you this guy just does not quit.

The last time we crossed paths was when he got us to put together a ‘Dragons Den’ style panel to grill some of his students over their potential game designs for Gapfiller’s ‘Super Street Arcade’ (that Giant joystick video game thing on Tuam Street.)
While I wasn’t allowed to give every team that presented an idea a straight F, I did my best to discourage them from the brutal field that is game development. Somehow, they managed to remain upbeat and proceeded to complete all their games on time and get them live for the general public to play which was obviously highly annoying.

This time round he wanted to bring in no less than ten thousand children (it seemed like that many) for a tour and then to basically steal our secret sauce on the refined process we have putting a hit game together from scratch.

I threw together a complex presentation full of some lit memes and I got our toughest presenter to roll it out – none other than Studio Head Nadia Thorne who has been known to have a go at Prime Ministers.  

These kids were not phased what so ever, so I assembled another intimidating panel made up of some aggressive developers/artists and some fierce project management to lay down the hard truths about Game Development –

• Having to get into the office at the crack of 9.30am
• Getting sick from too much virtual reality testing
• Waiting in line at the coffee machine for several minutes at a time
• Getting burned out from ‘researching’ too many video games  
• The struggle trying to pick which t-shirt to wear to work each morning

I do really have to say these kids are remarkable. From a show of hands there was around 60% of around 100 kids that are already using the game engine Unity – something we only picked up on a wide scale a couple of years ago. Nearly all of them had made their own games, something that took us around a year and a half when we first started.
They asked interesting questions, they were intelligent, funny, confident and most of them were even taller than me.
As I sat and watched my colleagues try and bestow on them their ultimate game development wisdom, I could only think that it would be just a matter of years before we were taking advice from them. This wasn’t a panel of game developers lecturing potential devs, this was a congregation of game crafters alike.

I look forward to them taking my job from me very shortly.

 

Author, Donny Harris – CerebralFix