It will take you through how a video game is created, what technology is involved and let you create your own characters, as well as a small “piece of animated game” o.O

Places are still available, £70 for the 2-day workshop in Edinburgh. More details on the Dare to be Digital website.

There are two formats for the competition this year, Do and Dream.

Do is the traditional development competition. Teams of 5 students or recent graduates are chosen from around the country to develop a game from scratch in 6 weeks over summer. The big difference this year is that they choose from ideas submitted by the community.

Dream is the new community section. Anybody can register on the website and pitch their game idea. Other people will vote for their favourite ideas and add comments. The Do team will then choose an idea each and develop the game for the competition. Those dreamers who submitted the chosen ideas will win the following:

• £500 cash prize for the originators of games subsequently chosen by the teams for development.
• An invitation to to the Dare Awards ceremony to receive the prize
• A single return UK flight and 3 nights’ accommodation to Edinburgh to take part in Dare ProtoPlay during the Edinburgh Festival period. Terms & Conditions apply. (If you are from overseas, you have the option of taking £200 in cash instead or we can fly you from London)
• Exposure to the top notch games companies and partners that Dare is associated with
• A showcase opportunity in Dare ProtoPlay
• Publicity

For more information check out the Dreamer’s FAQ and the Do-ers FAQ

Edinburgh Interactive Festival

Monday 13th August – 15:45 Games Actually
Sevket Gozolan, Marie-Sol Beaudry, Patrick O’Luanaigh, Sean Dromgoole
Are game developers and publishers paying attention to the fastest growing sector in the interactive games industry…the female gamer? Do they really need to? Join the debate with industry insiders Sean Dromgoole of Some Research, Marie-Sol Beaudry of Ubisoft, Patrick O’Luanaigh of nDreams and Sevket Gozalan of Play Vanilla.

S’pose that depends on whether or not you want to fight for attention in an almost-saturated market or expand your horizons to include new people, doesn’t it?

Monday 13th August – 16:30 Casting for Games – The CG Actor
Ian Livingstone
Casting CG characters in games is a different mindset and skill – Ian Livingstone of Eidos puts some logic behind the evolution of games generated character and what makes success.

Let’s see… in my gaming experience it seems to be mostly ‘person in distress that needs saving’ = female (or male). Military = male. Redshirt = male. Lackey = male. You mean there’s more to it? There certainly should be.

Tuesday 14 August – 13:45 Keynote: Simon Nelson
Simon Nelson who introduced podcasting in his last role for the BBC and now Head of BBC Vision reveals why BBC DG Mark Thompson said the corporation had something to learn from ‘games’ and how ‘games’ will figure in the beeb’s new media folio in the future.

I’ll freely admit I spent the last two years without a television. I get all the information I need through the internet. Nevertheless, I think the BBC still has an important part to play when it comes to public service.

Several years ago I was in conversation with a “Women’s Services” doctor. A character on one of the more popular soaps had unexpectedly died of cervical cancer. This led to a sudden surge of women reporting for the cervical smears that they had been neglecting for years, despite receiving many regular reminder letters. The waiting list for test results tripled in just a few weeks.

All because of a soap storyline.

Games, if done properly, can be just as educational. Every once in a while you hear that young people are watching less TV. Public service broadcasting needs to find a way to engage with them (us). Fun games with a serious message could be the answer.

The official Edinburgh Interactive Festival website will give you the full programme details, along with venue information. It’s unfortunately rather pricey to actually attend – £141 if you book before 1st August or an almost-affordable £88.13 for students. I shall not be going :(

This year’s contest is now accepting entries from London and the South East of England. For those living elsewhere, I do apologise for not covering this earlier. The Irish and Scottish application deadline was apparently 11th April 2007. There doesn’t seem to be a Welsh centre this year.

If you’re a university student in London or recently graduated and you want to get into video game development, this competition is probably the best start you can get. I interviewed former competitor Stephen McGreal. He was team leader of Zoo Crew, who won the prize for “Greatest Market Potential” back in 2003. Since the competition Stephen has worked for EA and Rockstar Leeds:

It’s fair to say that I would have had a much harder time getting into the industry if I hadn’t been in Dare. One of the senior guys from EA was on the judging panel that year, and was so impressed that he invited the two winning teams down to the studio in Chertsey to present our Dare projects to the rest of the studio. To cut a long story short, 3 of us were basically hired on the spot. So in terms of actually getting into the industry, Dare was great.

What games companies want to see from graduate employees is not necessarily how good their grades are, but an example of what they’re actually capable of. Dare gives you a great showcase. It means you can turn out a demo which shows exactly what you’re capable of under stressful conditions, and if games companies can see that, it makes it a lot easier for them to decide if they want to hire you.

Dare To Be Digital is a notoriously intensive competition. The team has to develop a playable game prototype in just 10 weeks. Press release extract:

Teams of 5 students, a mix of artists and programmers, assemble in a regional hosting centre for 10 weeks to develop a prototype video game, receiving daily support and weekly training sessions from industry specialists.

At the end of the competition, the prototypes will be displayed at a special talent showcasing event in Edinburgh, Dare ProtoPlay, alongside the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival in August. In a first for Dare, the general public as well as industry experts will get to play and vote for the games. Prizes will then be awarded to the winning teams at a special awards ceremony in Dundee.

Emphasis mine.

This year’s Dare To Be Digital is running from 6th June 2007 to 16th August 2007. You will have to commit 35 hours a week to the competition. The London and the South East regional centre is in EA’s Guildford offices. There is the chance of a week’s leave, with the permission of your team and the Project Manager.

So, are you an aspiring games developer? Did you graduate within the past 2 years from a London or South East university,or are you still studying there? Then it’s time to get your team together and enter this competition. The application deadline is either 7th May (acccording to the press release) or 20th May (according to the official website). I’d say hedge your bets and get your application in ASAP.

I’ll be covering the progress of this UK-based games development competition as it progresses. Check back in June or subscribe to our newsfeed if you don’t want to miss out.

I’ll leave you with some advice from Stephen…

Have fun. If you’re not having fun making the game, there’s a pretty good chance that the game you’re making isn’t fun. And nobody likes games which aren’t fun.

Links:
Dare To Be Digital Official Website

Most Commercial Potential – Artisan with Metalheads (Go Tommy!)

Greatest Innovation and Creativity – Log2 n with Flux

Best Use of Technology for Product Delivery – Rule of Thumb with Gal Ex: Spacial Delivery

Best use of Screenwriting – Phaigo Interactive with Spaceport

And the Virtuoso Prize, which was sponsored and awarded by Denki went to Nicholas Koumentakis of Phaigo Interactive. I shall have to find out what the heck that was later, when the party hangovers have worn off.

Congratulations to everyone. The full list of prizes is on the official website awards page.

Not that hostile? Faint praise… Joking aside, I’m sure everyone’s more focused on making the best game they can, not bitching about others’. Click on the images to view each team’s diary.

Hosted by the University of Abertay in Dundee, Dare to be Digital is a fantastic way for students to get to grips with the realities of working in game development. As goes the mantra on many a developer’s recruitment pages, just about anyone can come up with an idea. Converting that idea to a finished product is a much more complex and painful process and this competition not only forces the students to deal with that reality but also provides immense support in the form of training sessions and advice from established games companies like Rare, EA, Nintendo of Europe and many others. What better way for an aspiring game developer to make those invaluable industry contacts?

Competitors from previous years are now employed EA, Denki, Rockstar, Eutechnyx and Criterion (now also EA). Industry professionals TPLD have their origins in the competition, which just goes to show how much of a jump-start it can give you.

One of the teams, Artisan, is working on a game called Metalhead. It is planned to use a gesture system reminiscent of the one in Lionhead’s Black & White and features Meta, “a magnetic stomping robot who can run, jump, magnetize the Metalheads to him and forge blocks using pure magnetic energy”. Plus, he can fly. Tommy Millar, Artisan’s team leader had the following to say about his experience of this year’s competition:

“Just when we think we’ve got it down, another little agitation pops up. It’s like whack-a-mole. Except nothing like it, physically. Now, it’s more of a “Stay in here from 8 until 9″ kinda affair, with weekends being in bounds also. I try not to drive my team too far, but we aim to have a fantastic game by the end, not just a ‘good’ one, so it’ll all be worth it.

I must admit, at the beginning, I believed this to be no more than a competition. However at this point in time I can now say that’s a completely misguided assumption; this competition has readied us for the real world. The amount of support people from Denki, Rare, Nintendo, Cohort, EA and more have given us has changed my mind about everything – from things that seem common sense to others I wouldn’t have learned in a lifetime otherwise – and I can’t recommend Dare to be Digital enough. Get a game design document ready for next year!!”

This year’s competition will culminate with the awards ceremony next Friday, 18th August 2006. Registration for the the awards ceremony is still open and will remain so until Monday 14th August so if you’re interested you can register here.

The competition is, unfortunately, limited by funding that they receive from regional development agencies. As such, this year’s competition was only open to students attending Scottish, Northern Irish and Republic of Ireland Universities or Colleges of Art and Algoma University College in Canada. Regions for next year have not been secured yet but if you’re interested, there’s no harm in thinking about your design and pulling together a team. Plenty of this year’s entrants worried about making it through the selection process. Stewart Hogarth, member of the team winning “Greatest Market Potential” in 2003 and now an employee of Denki suggests that you focus on the following areas when developing your proposal, based on his own experience:

• Is your idea achievable?
• Is the team capable?
• Does the idea have potential?
• Is the idea original?… and after all that it’ll come down to
  whichever ideas sound the most interesting.

Sage advice. There’s no point in turning up with a plotline and some character designs and expecting the “little” details like AI, level layout, world physics and movement animation to just fall into place when you get working. Start thinking about them now and you might just have a shot at making it through selection next year.

Seven days until the teams are judged… tension mounting all around. Winners will be announced next Friday, 18th August 2006. Good luck and congratulations to everyone taking part.

Related Links:
2005′s Dare to be Digital entries
Clark Boyd from PRI’s The World on the competition – wma streaming audio. [found via CathodeTan]

Edit: Just a note to say that all images in this post are © 2006 Dare to be Digital