Continuing on with my theme of looking at the positive aspects of the Dundee game development scene, I wanted to highlight one of the more enjoyable events I have experienced recently: Dare ProtoPlay 2010. ProtoPlay is the showcase event for Dare to be Digital, a game development competition that originated at Abertay University in Dundee and consists of student teams from all over the world converging on Scotland to make games together over the course of ten weeks. This year's ProtoPlay event was held in Edinburgh, and it marked the eleventh year that the Dare competition has been running. This was my first time attending, and I was astounded at the sheer quality and diversity of output that was on display.
Diversity was evident in every aspect of ProtoPlay this year. First and foremost was geographical diversity, with the 15 participating student teams hailing from all over the globe including China, England, India, Ireland, Sweden, Scotland, the United States and Wales. Dare has been increasing in scope with each successive year, and the international flair lends ProtoPlay a worldly atmosphere, with the show floor taking on the character of a multicultural game development bazaar. This year's bazaar was teeming with riches, with games encompassing an impressive variety of platforms. I have never witnessed any competition, including the IGF, where the final selections spanned such a wide range of devices. Within my first hour of walking around, I saw games targeting Android, iPad, Windows 7 Phone, PSP Go, Xbox, PC, and Wii - and that's not including the exhibitors that weren't a part of the competition itself, as there were also playable demos on hand showcasing games for Bamboo tablets, XBLA, Kinect and more.
Of course, having a heterogeneous set of platforms represented doesn't mean much in itself, particularly if all you end up with is a slew of nearly identical puzzle platformers for each device; thankfully, the versatility displayed by the student teams also extended to their game designs. Upon entering the main hall of the show, I was greeted with the sight of a soccer game that utilized a Wii remote strapped to the player's foot. Directly opposite this game, another student team was showing off a turn-based, 3D dice challenge that pitted players against each other in a battle of wits, enticing them to flex their spatial reasoning skills on a large numerical game grid. Moving past these, I quickly encountered a four player co-op brawler, an RTS, an inventive stealth/racing hybrid, and (my personal favorite) a fast paced overhead fighting/strategy game that involved unicorns vomiting rainbows at each other. There were games where players navigated the environment by shapeshifting, painting, playing music, shooting grappling hooks, controlling the weather, switching dimensions, and even altering the emotions of their avatar. In all fairness, there was no shortage of the requisite puzzle platformers in the mix as well, but these generally acquitted themselves nicely through sheer ingenuity, attention to detail, and solid execution of their underlying concepts.
Apart from the eclectic approaches to genre and platform, the other aspect of ProtoPlay that struck me was how adept the students were at marketing their games during the show. Seemingly every team had a cornucopia of promotional items on hand to offer to players and passersby. This is becoming the norm at some of the more prominent competitions such as the IGF, but in my experience most student competitions tend to overlook marketing entirely. Not so at ProtoPlay. Honestly, the consistency of the students in evangelizing their games was superior to what I have seen even among indie developers at the IGF - I think some of those folks could actually take some lessons from these students with regard to self-promotion.
I was so baffled by this discrepancy between ProtoPlay and most other student competitions that I did some additional research, and it turns out that the Dare teams are judged based on how well they promote their games in addition to the overall quality of the finished product. Students are strongly incentivized to blog about their development process, and are even encouraged to assign a specific team member to handle interfacing with the game's target audience. This was a revelation to me, despite the fact that it couldn't be more obvious in hindsight. Students understandably tend to have a myopic fixation on the development process itself when entering these sorts of competitions, particularly when they are still unaccustomed to dealing with the logistics of implementing a complex game under strenuous time constraints. But why don't more of these events incorporate marketing into the criteria when evaluating the efforts of student teams? Purists may scoff at this notion, arguing that having to consider something so base as promotional appeal would stifle the creativity of the students, but the ProtoPlay entrants I saw this year stand in marked contrast to this objection.
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