Games Guru, Andy Gahan, visits Uclan Games Design course

Games design students at Uclan recently enjoyed a fantastically informative presentation from games Guru, Andy Gahan of The Pixel Bullies. 
The students loved this frank and valuable advice from Andy who has 25 years of experience at the top of the games industry.
Former, Senior Development Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and previously Art & Outsource Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (Evolution Studios),  
Andy has extensive experience, which he generously shared with us. 

Andy talked about indie mid developed game companies, and what it's like/ that it's possible to run your own company in the current environment. This was such an inspiration to our aspiring students!

A big 'thank you ' to Andy from us and also to Nicola Eagleton and her team, Faye Grima; Chris Lishman; Bhavnita Parekh; Victoria Bradley; Whitney Griffiths, from Uclan Public Relations and Marketing course, who organised the event.

You can see part of Andy's presentation on the link below.

The whole lecture can be heard at the SoundCloud link below thanks to student, Oli Hughes

Games Design course visit from Concept Games Artist, Shaun Mooney

Uclan Games Design course was really pleased to welcome one of our Alumni, Concept Games Artist, Shaun Mooney, to the studio recently for a fantastic workshop day.

Shaun who has worked for several big name games companies such as Atomhawk, TT-Fusion and currently Playdemic spent a full day with us.
He shared his extensive experience and expertise with the students through a practical demonstration followed by a portfolio surgery session with students from a variety of year groups. Students  found the experience very valuable.
You can link to Shaun's blog here.

You can see images of Shaun's workshop below.

 

Peter Field - Games Designer at Naughty Dog

Fantastic opportunity for Uclan Games Design students - in conversation with Peter Field,
games designer at Naughty Dog CA.
Peter is a graduate of the BA Games Design course at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and has gone on to work on many popular game titles,
most recently 'Uncharted 3' and 'The Last of Us' with Naughty Dog in California.
Here, Peter shares his experience and advice about preparing for such a role and how to develop a portfolio and forge a great career in the industry.
Naturally, it was a real buzz for us all when Peter very generously took time out very early in the morning, on his holiday, to link up with us on Skype for a chat.
Click the image below to see the video of the QA session

Meet the Developer. Stephen Morris of Greenfly Studios

Uclan Games Design course recently ran a Skype QA session with Stephen Morris, Co-Director at Greenfly Studios

a small independent games company developing original titles for desktop and mobile platforms.

Luckily for us,  Games design tutor, Pete Bottomley, of WhitePaper Games introduced us to Stephen, so we were able to ask him to tune in on Skype for an afternoon chat session.
As the Technical Director / Lead programmer of a small company, Stephen gave students some really valuable advice about how to manage design work. He also has lots of useful ideas about networking.
We had an hour of entertaining and informative chatter which proved to be great inspiration for our games design students.

You can see the video of the QA session here: