On the official first day at NZGDC there was a lot to do and see! But first was to head to the venue at roughly 10am with my fellow CODE scholarship peeps to attend our Bootcamp!
At the first official CODE Bootcamp we met loads of people, learnt a lot about the do’s and don’ts of networking… But mostly how cool and friendly everyone in the NZ games industry is and how they generally look out for everyone.
We were made to feel right and home and ready to make the most of the experience at our first NZGDC!
Straight away I made my way to the Games Zone where I started to play some cool games presented by the devs. The first I played was a first-person shooter which reminded me of Bionicles and Halo called Orbifold by Wild Vector Games. I thought it stood out due to the fact the whole game world takes place inside of a sphere.
The next stop was to a familiar face in the Christchurch gaming community. Chris at Crayonix Games and his fun puzzle game Rollick N’ Roll. I think I am very bad at video games as I spent a while being unable to get passed the first level, and when Chris told me his children (under five) could beat the levels I decided I needed to take a break.
At 12pm we had the official opening ceremony as we were treated to a great cultural welcoming by the local iwi, with waiata and te reo Māori.
After the warm welcoming, grand speeches, and the revelation that we as game developers are worth 700,000-ish dollars in the current New Zealand gaming economy, we had a surprising key note speaker…
Kate Edwards who talked about her long career in the game development industry, from being a cartographer at Microsoft to their political deescalater, and some inspirational words of wisdom. That we as people should never underestimate our own abilities and that everyone experiences self-doubt.
As three o’clock rolled around I shuffled into a packed lecturing hall to support my friend Jennifer Kaiser as she talked about her master’s research on wayfinding in video games. She was one of our CODE scholarship recipients, so it was cool to see her being able to share her knowledge because of the funding.
Check her our if you want to learn more about wayfinding!!
After the talk I headed back into the Game Zone and there I stopped by a VR experience to check out a Māori studio and their immersive title Atuatanga. This title presents a futuristic world where we must harness magic to save humanity and it is told entirely in Māori.
Next door to the VR game was a cool fella casually sitting in an airplane seat… Turns out he is one of three developers from Liquid Static Studio who made the very cool PSX-style horror game ‘Night Plane‘ .
I got very excited to see them as I wanted to meet as many indie horror game devs at this conference as I could. I spent at least half an hour just chatting to them.
The fella below is called Francis and he was kind enough to let me take a photo of him!
And this lovely human is Izzie the UI and art director of the game. She made this cat! We chatted a lot about the UI, fonts, and I will most certainly be looking for a low-poly plush maker in the future…
To finish the end to a second perfect day we attended the diversity social event atop the BNZ building where I snapped a good view of Auckland. I didn’t take any other photos, but they had loads of pizza and great peeps for chats.
I met most of the Christchurch game development students currently working on fund projects like a top-down recreation of central Christchurch for phone games in local libraries. You can see their work here: Patchwork: Ōtautahi.
Another was a long discussion about traditional writing and the journey into game development. This turned into a discussion with Massy University students about their projects, one which I intended to track down and play the following day (Spellhaven: The Last Lighthouse Keeper on Steam).
And another was a student from Auckland who is currently working on a regency cat dating simulator. You can follow its early progress here: Regency Cats Dev Log – Rivwynn Studio. I can’t wait to see where that one goes!
