#madscientistsofindiedev

[surefootingdev]

Looking back at our steps at this year’s Norwich Gaming Festival (NGF 2017)

A few words from Tommy about this year’s Norwich Festival:

It has now been three weeks since our trip to the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival began. First with Matt and I heading down to the education week, followed by Molly joining us during the Indie exhibition week to show off Sure Footing. This was our third visit to this festival and it’s one we’ve not only seen grow in terms of its scale and organisation, but a consistent enthusiasm and energy from the exhibitors and attendees. It is well organised and always a fun time for us.  As such, it is one of the few events that run every year that we guarantee to attend (provided they let us in that is).

However, our attendance was a little different this year. Matt and I visited Norwich in the week prior to the Indie exhibition in order to take part in the education week: a series of talks, workshops and other activities involving primary and secondary school kids. This is a nice change of pace for us, but also something we’re really passionate about: getting kids excited about the prospects of games (and related technologies) as a career and getting them thinking about how to make steps towards that.   

As someone who has taught at university level for 10 years, I often find it frustrating to see how most effort in career advice is aimed at students in the later stages of secondary school (i.e. choosing their A-Levels, BTECs or Scottish Highers), when in truth we need to be thinking about this much earlier than that. This not only ensures you focus efforts on GCSE’s, but also extracurricular activities or after-school clubs can help maintain an enthusiasm and interest at the time when that young boy or girl needs to hear it most. This is especially the case with young girls, many of whom have the capacity and skills for the problem-solving nature of computer programming, but seldom make it to the opening lecture of an undergraduate degree.

I was suitably impressed by the level of knowledge many of the students already had in areas such as programming and problem solving: with many schools now introducing Scratch. Basic principles of algorithmic thinking are being seeded at a very early age and it shows as a throw graduate level problem-solving tasks to primary school children. They were excited, they were interested and having a lot of fun. That makes my job a lot easier! 

On that note, a shout out to Shaun Spalding - my partner in crime for the live game-making sessions who did an *amazing* job - as well as BAFTA’s Mel Phillips and Michael Warburton who also delivered great sessions with the kids. Plus also a thank you to Sarah Power and the team at the Norwich Forum who did a great job to accommodate our needs during the week. 

Now as for the indie exhibition itself, I defer to Matt:

It is always a pleasure displaying at the Norwich Gaming Festival and it is one of the festivals we look forward to every year. Not just because we get let out from behind the desk or the fact that we have a week not working on the game, but we love going to this festival because of the family friendly atmosphere, the players and all the kind words they say about the artwork. Also of course the interesting range of other Indie developers who showcase at the event. This year was especially important for us because for the first year out of the three we have been coming, we were sponsors of the event. This was mainly due to us helping to run workshops the week before the main festival for the Norwich Gaming Festival Education Week, but still a big step - Table Flip Games first official sponsoring!

Each year when we showcase our game we get compliments about the artwork, and we especially get lots of questions about how we came up with the art style and the world of Computra. I would be lying if we had it locked down from the start. Over the last two years of development, it has taken a lot of work, sleepless nights and throwing ideas away to come up with the world of Computra and the art style. We spent a lot of time prototyping ideas for them to be thrown out again and we also had to irritate on design throughout the development process. Tommy and I gave a talk at the festival that went more into depth about our process.

We also get to meet so many amazing gamers during Norwich each year - fellow devs and also families are attending the event. This year we even had folks remembering the game from last year, which brings a big smile to all our faces! 

So, from the Sure Footing team, we send the biggest thank you to all our fans out there and we are looking forward to coming back with more wonderful, wacky and bright neon coloured art in the future 😊.