Get into games design - Feb 2022
In February 2022, I participated in the Prince's Trust Get Into Game Design course. Over the span of five days, I received talks from industry professionals like James Wallis (Games Design Fundamentals/How To Find Fun), Sarah Sorrell (Safe In Our World - Mental Health in the Games Industry) and various members of development teams at different studios including PlayStation and Media Molecule.
On our first day, we made our first workable board game prototype in under an hour with the theme of "upgrading". Working with two others, my team created a simple 4 player dice rolling game where players 'upgraded' by means of acquiring cards featuring weapons, armour and abilities. Although a crude prototype, our game worked well enough to prove a concept. As producer for the group, my job was to streamline our production, quickly narrowing the scope of development to something manageable for completion and enjoyable to play.
The rest of our five day course was focused on creating a board game to a brief. The brief we were provided was to create a family friendly board game, extending an existing franchise. My team consisted of myself as producer, Sam who was our art director and Kawsar who lead design. We chose to create a board game based on a franchise we all knew - Assassin's Creed. Similarly to games like Fortnite that feature violent themes, we approached the family friendly aspect by avoiding violent terms like 'kill' opting to use thematically appropriate words like 'de-synchronise' as used in the Assassin's Creed franchise.
Over the course of our four days working together, it was my job to oversee production, assign roles based on our skills, scale back production where and when was necessary and ensure that we met our 2pm deadline on the Friday. I am pleased to say that we met that deadline comfortably, with ample playtesting time and a full pitch ready.
This is where I realised my desire to join the games industry. My skillset allowed me to take on a leadership role within the project, as well as helping my team to feel comfortable working with one another within such a short time frame, while still keen to learn as much as I could.
I got to discuss the course’s impact with NextGen. You can read the article here.
Testimonials
“Charlie was a delight to have as part of the course. He was an instinctive and natural leader bringing together the team, setting tasks and ensuring everyone was involved and doing OK. His team's board games design was really fun and competitive, he took and gave feedback constructively and he is a very confident and engaging public speaker.”
– Gina Jackson OBE, SKILLfull
“I had the pleasure of working with Charlie on a games design course where I was able to see and support his outstanding development. I found him to be a passionate and very knowledgeable worker who is able to adapt within a team, encouraging other members to participate while being able to lead where needed. I believe Charlie would be a valuable member of any team and would not hesitate to recommend him.”
- Nigel Twumasi, mayamada co-founder
Event Support
In addition to my own development with the Prince’s Trust course, I was asked to attend the Gamepad Family and Friends Game Jam on behalf of NextGen Skills Academy. This is where I took on the role of Support Facilitator, helping to run the game jam, as well as assisting the attending teams to make their very own games.
On top of game jams, I’ve been able to assist NextGen with various other events, including their graduation showcase 2022 and onset Visual Effects training from Cave Academy.