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June Newsletter

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Bristol Games Hub Newsletter

The latest updates from the hub, news from Bristol & SW developers, jobs, opportunities & events.

Bristol Games Hub is a non-profit space for games and play. We run this newsletter, host events and also rent desk space at a cost price with no strings attached so you can get on and create amazing games. Contact debbie at aurochdigital dot com for more information or with news items for the next newsletter and let us know if you have any news you would like sharing in the next one by 15th July please!

Next Games Hub Anti-Social: 27th August, 7.30pm

We’ll give you more info on what they will be closer to the time, but stick the date in your diaries! If you have a suggestion for a talk, drop us an email!

Games Hub News:

BGH Marketing Group Meetup
The Hub marketing group, an informal meet-up of people to talk about the means and ways to market games, is meeting on Wednesday 17th at 7.30pm. We’re talking Reddit & Facebook this time plus a general chat. If you want to come along, please email tom at aurochdigital dot com so we know you’re coming as numbers are limited! If you can’t make it, we’ve got an email discussion group too here.

Going to Develop: Brighton?
We’re putting together an informal dinner for developers, on the evening of the Tuesday 14th. If you are interesting in coming for some food, drop us an email to debbie at aurochdigital dot com. Spaces are limited, so we can’t promise anything!

Monday 22nd June: Unity Meetup – More Procedural Meshes!
Full info is below in events. Info page is here.

SW Freelancer/Company Dev Directory
If you’re looking for people to help on a project, or you are available for work – put your details in. Please only list info you’re happy to have in the public domain:http://bit.ly/bghdirectory

SW Game Dev Jobs Facebook page – Find roles and post new openings here…

Dev Scene News

Pocket Gamer Connects – San Francisco

After successes in London, Helsinki, and Bangalore, Pocket Gamer Connects is going stateside and bringing the premier mobile-focused B2B event to San Francisco on the 7th and 8th of July. More information is available at pgconnects.com, and you can keep up with the event on #PGCSanFran. If you’re headed out there, contact Bristol-based journalist Peter Willington, who will be in attendance.

More info links:
http://www.pgconnects.com/
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pgcsanfran
Or contact Peter on; peter.willington at steelmedia dot co dot uk

Creative Gaming Award

PLAY15 festival introduces the new ‘Creative Gaming Award’ You can submit concepts, alpha and/or beta for any game that deals with the medium in a creative way. Categories are;
– Most Creative Game
– Most Innovative Newcomer
Deadline is 15th July and there is no cost to enter and winner gets €3000! Full info on this PDF.

Auroch Digital

First off, a huge thanks to all who have signal-boosted the news of Dark Future: Blood Red States. We had great coverage from PC Gamer, Kotaku, Game Debate, Rock Paper Shotgun, Pocket Tactics and many more! We’ve also announced the winner of our Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night competition – to write the best 80s action movie style review!  We’re also recruiting and have a jobs page on our site now, which can be found here and below.

Twice Circled

Twice Circled, “I released the Big Pharma beta earlier this month. It’s a game about running your own pharmaceutical company. I’ve been astounded by the response from Youtubers/streamers with some really high profile people covering it, including Northern Lion and Sips from The Yogscast. Despite a few graphical bugs and some performance problems, the general reception has been overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t be happier. The full release on Steam is planned for later this year. For further information, head over to the official website.”

Jobs & Opportunities

Auroch Digital

We have now filled the Producer role (and welcome Kelly Venables to the team!) We’ve still got open vacancies for an experienced programmer and an office manger/book keeper! http://www.aurochdigital.com/jobs/

Creative Youth Network

Creativeyouthnetwork.org.uk do great work with young people and are looking for a paid mentor to help a talented upcoming game developer – anyone interested?

Events Diary

Games Hub Marketing Group (June 17th 7.30pm)

Join us at Bristol Games Hub for a peer learning session about how to tell fans about our games. We’ll be looking at social media and Reddit. Email tom at auroch digital dot com if you want to come along!

Lunchtime Talk: Bringing computing into the real world (1pm Friday 19 June – Pervasive Media Studio)

We all love our computers, but generally they are mostly something we keep indoors. In this week’s talk, the PM Studio are delighted to welcome digital artist and creative coder Seb Lee-Delisle to the Studio. Seb will be showing us that really amazing things can happen when we take our computers into the elements.
http://www.watershed.co.uk/pmstudio/events/fri-19062015-100pm

Wales Games Developer Show (June 19th)

Pop over the border to see what the great devs in Wales have been up to and make some new connections! Info is here: http://www.walesgamesdevshow.org/

Unity Meetup – More Procedural Meshes! (June 22nd 7.30pm)

At Bristol Games Hub: The Unity meetup is back, on a Monday no less! This time around we have the second instalment on how to create 3D models from code ready for you. In this final part of his talk, Alexander will cover the following topics:

  • A short recap on creating procedural meshes to introduce newcomers to the topic and provider a refresher to everyone who attended last time
  • UV coordinates & Texturing. How to put pretty pictures on the surfaces of your meshes.
  • Bezier curves. Create smooth curves to define surfaces or paths
  • Delaunay Triangulation. Turn an arbitrary series of points into a surface with Triangle.Net

Signup to the meetup can be found on our meetup page:
http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Unity-Game-Developers-Meetup/events/223161687/

Board Game Night (1st July, 7.30pm)

Join us at Bristol Games Hub on 1st July to play amazing board games. Bring a title along and/or join in another game. All welcome – email tom at aurochdigital dot com if you want to come along.

Lunchtime Talk: Hardware Startups, Manufacturing, and the Far East: a how to (1pm Friday 17 July – Pervasive Media Studio)

This week the PM Studio welcomes back product designer, maker, manufacturing engineer and 3D printing enthusiast Richard de Lancey. He was nominated for Stuff Magazine’s Design of the Year award for his work on AlphaSphere and is currently running his third startup business; DELCO – a design and manufacture agency based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
http://www.watershed.co.uk/pmstudio/events/fri-17072015-100pm

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Thanks all!

Level-up! Bristol Games Hub Sept. Newsletter

Posted on

Below is news from the growing Bristol & South West games development scene. You find news from the hub, news from Bristol & SW developers then jobs, opportunities & events.

Bristol Games Hub is a non-profit space for games and play. We run this news letter, host events and also rent desk space at a cost price with no strings attached so you can get on and create amazing games. Contact geoff at aurochdigital.com for more information or with news items for the next newsletter and let us news for the next one by 15th October please!

SW Freelancer/Company Dev Directory
If you’re looking for people to help on a project, or you are available for work – put your details in. Please only list info that you’re happy to have in the public domain: http://bit.ly/bghdirectory

SW Game Dev Jobs Facebook pageFind roles and post new openings here…

Next Games Hub Anti-Social: Thursday 25th September, 7.30pm

This month we’ve got: Auroch Digital’s Abhishek Sagi shares the basics of his award winning new technology for making cloth in games!

“Even today in video games, accuracy and level of detail for cloth in-game is mostly coarse due to complex non linear physical properties, and computing power necessary to simulate it real-time. The talk will provide an introduction to developing robust, scalable and parallelized soft body simulation frameworks for real-time and offline rendering.”

So join us on the 25th September at 7.30pm – we’ve got a buzzer now! The entrance is off Thomas Street, just up from the junction of Thomas St/Stokes Croft, above DHS Heating.

Games Hub News:

9th October 6pm – Games Marketing Chat
Making games is one things, selling them another… With around 200+ games PER DAY being released, how do you let players know about your creation? This informal group is going to discuss strategies, ideas and more. Contact tom at aurochdigital dot com for more info or just come to the hub that evening.

OpenCo! Visit the Hub!
The Games Hub is taking part in the OpenCo event where the doors are thrown open and you can come and check us out and what we do! If you’re really desperate for some Opposable action though…catch us at OpenCo at the hub on 2nd October:
http://uk.openco.us/bath-bristol/

Dev Scene News

Queen of Code

Creative England and Crowdfunder.co.uk have joined in order to fund England’s top female game developers and freelancers via an innovative crowdfunding campaign. Female developers are asked to submit their campaigns, and the first 3 to hit their target will each receive a £5k boost from Creative England. More info here:www.crowdfunder.co.uk/queenofcode

GamesLab Campus

Creative England have teamed up with PlayStation® on an incubator and accelerator programme called GamesLab Campus. Creative England’s GamesLab Campus programme will invest a maximum of £250,000 into five Games companies (up to £50,000 each) to support the development of new and innovative entertainment experiences on PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®Vita. More details here:http://gameslab.creativeengland.co.uk/gameslab/campus/

GamesLab South West Masterclasses

GamesLab Masterclasses will be running in Bristol 13th – 15th October. The classes offer 3, day sessions on; Player Research, Narrative Development, and SCRUM Agile.  Early bird tickets are £50 (available until 29th September) with normal price being £100. More details here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gameslab-south-west-masterclasses-tickets-11803292967

Opposable Games

We recently published a short showreel with a whole host of our work on, so if you haven’t had the chance to check it out then do please take a look and pass it on. It features some pretty sweet music from local boy labgrownmusic and some rather tasty editing from another helpful local by the name of Jim Roper. A lot of what we’re doing is classified right now; if we told you we’d have to kill you. Sorry.

If you’re really desperate for some Opposable action though…catch us at OpenCo at the hub on 2nd October, or under the SouthWest VR monicker at the Watershed’s Sci Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder event on 25th October, or the Bath Digital Festivalon 27th October.

Auroch Digital

We’ve been giving our website a bit of a much needed re-vamp: check it out here!http://aurochdigital.com – oh and we also welcomed the 13th employee of Auroch, Mark, who joins our busy dev team!

Bertram Fiddle going on an adventure to EGX London

Rumpus will be at EGX London to showcase our point and click game staring leading Victorian explorator Bertram Fiddle. Visitors will be able to explore brand new locations, share a cup of tea with Sherlock Holmes and be dazzled by our wide array of fantastical moustaches and quirky noses. So if you are at EGX feel free to drop by, and give the game a go at our booth.

Get #hookedonmusic

Calling all music lovers. Last chance to help science figure out what makes pop music catchy. #hookedonmusic is a citizen science game developed by The Reading Room for the Museum of Science and Industry and supported by the Wellcome Trust. www.hookedonmusic.org.uk
PEACEapp

Have a great game about facilitating peace or an idea for one? Submit it to PEACEapp, a competition that aims to showcase the work of developers who examine peace and promote games as venues for cultural dialogue and conflict management. Send your entry here by the October 15 deadline.
http://www.unaoc.org/peaceapp/enter/

Events

Chaos Unpub: Playtest Event for Board & Card Games

On Saturday, 4th October we’ll be dedicating ourselves to playtesting unpublished tabletop games and providing valuable feedback in an attempt to bring those designs one-step closer to publication. We invite game designers, publishers, players, retailers and artists from all over the country to attend the first Chaos Unpub event…and it’s FREE!  Hosted by Chaos Publishing, this event will be taking place at the Christian Malford Village Hall where we can open our doors for up to 150 budding designers/playtesters. We will be prepared with plenty of available parking at the venue and food available throughout the day. The event will start at 11:00 and run until 20:00. We hope to see you there!
Please find the full details at: http://www.meetup.com/Playtest/events/202898032/
…and also on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/events/659760337472982/

Bath Digital Festival – Gaming for Good

Games are doing much more now than just fun – they are educating, becoming therapy and helping to tackle serious problems.

Non-gamers often only see games in over-hyped tabloid headlines casting them in a bad light. However with around one in three of our fellow citizens now playing games, this session takes a second look at an industry that has grown in scope, subject matter and relevance. Join us to find out how Auroch Digital have been turning news into games, how Knowle West Media Center used games to talk about domestic violence and accessibility expert Ian Hamilton on how technology can be built to open them up to wider audiences.

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/games-for-good-the-panel-tickets-12707294861

Shadowing: Come and play in the light

As the sun sets and the street lights come on, traces of those who have passed under the lights are played throughout the city, re-animating the streets. As you walk under the light, the shadow of the previous visitor walks beside. While you interact or react to the shadow, your movements and actions are recorded, becoming the shadow for the next visitor. If a visitor remains under the lamp, the lamp reaches further back in time, playing back the shadows of its previous visitors. Shadowing will appear in locations across the city, and linger until the end of October. Shadowing.cc
http://shadowing.cc/

Lunchtime Talk: Nikki Pugh’s Colony: Friday, 19 September 201413:00 to 14:00

As part of her ongoing project Colony, artist Nikki Pugh has been in residence at the Pervasive Media Studio over the Summer constructing panicked heartbeats, twitchy tails and slinky vertebrae. Join us for a lunchtime talk (and possibly a walk afterwards) as all these are brought together to form landscape-reactive ‘creatures’, carried/worn by participants and designed to affect how we experience moving through the city.
http://www.watershed.co.uk/pmstudio/project/colony

Lunchtime Talk: Oscar Raby Friday, 24 October 2014 13:00 to 14:00

In 1973 Oscar Raby’s father witnessed the execution of a group of prisoners captured by the military regime in Chile, the army he was a part of. Raby, a multimedia designer and visual artist, turned to the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset to tell his father’s story in Assent. Come along to hear about Oscar’s journey in interactive storytelling and the making of the innovative and moving Assent project. This talk is guest presented by Mandy Rose, director of UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre.
http://oscarraby.net/wp/assent/

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