In Part 2 I mentioned the problem I had with the other artist – but the team also had other problems. The characters I designed, modelled, textured and animated had to fit into an animation system one of the programmers was working on. He never finished this. So we had a game that involved daemons searching for a child, who the player was supposed to protect. The game itself had no daemons in it. The game didn’t work and looked terrible when compared to the other games in the competition. The games that tend to do well in Dare are casual games that are bright and colourful. Our game was a difficult, dark game that involved devils, an apocalypse and a child that could die. Not exactly cheerful.
At the end of the competition we had to present the game in Edinburgh to the general public- an event called Dare Protoplay – imagine a large room filled with games and young kids running around playing them- kinda like a trade show and a playground. This was actually fairly enjoyable, despite the fact no one understood the game, no one could work the FPS controls and the game was not finished. It would crash after about 5 minutes. Luckily most people had lost patience with the game by then. Not to mention after 10 weeks of working hard to get the finished the last thing I wanted to talk about was a game that wasn’t working.

Apart from these problems I believe that I completed a lot of great work and the team generally did get on and work very hard for the ten weeks. Never the less 4 years later and I don’t work in the games industry. But at least I can show some good work which I still stands up 4 years later and is still a major part of my portfolio. Some of the promotional images I created are below. The first image was taken by the organisers of Dare and partly used to promote Dare 2008. It was published in Edge Magazine and other publications. My association with Dare didn’t end there and I’ll post about this in the future. Never the less this years competition starts soon, but if I’m honest I’m not really aware of what’s been developed in the competition over the past few years.

Even though I was part of Dare To Be Digital 4 years ago I wanted to blog about it now. I feel my participation was wasted opportunity. Recently Dare was part of a channel 4 documentary. One of the industry experts in the documentary said (and I am paraphrasing here) “It’s unheard of a participant to apply themselves and not get a job in the games industry”. I disagree. I applied myself and even though I don’t work in the games industry (although I did after I left university), I still have a good body of work that allowed me to develop projects for Scottish Screen and Channel 4, not to mention the artwork I have exhibited recently.