Dare to be Digital – Protoplay
I nipped across town at this point rather than seeing the next couple of talks, as I wanted to see the end results of the Dare to be Digital competition. As promised on Sunday night, there was an impressive range of games on display, and all showed promise in one form or another. Titles to note were the Cupid game from the guys from Guildford, where you fly around encouraging people to falling in love by causing accidental meetings that might lead to a whirlwind romance; also a fun and polished puzzle title in the vein of Loco Roco, where the player has to guide a pool of water through the level, tilting the world and freezing and boiling the water to change its form; and a stealth-based third person ninja title with an interesting audible/visual mechanic. My vote eventually went to a local (Edinburgh) team though, who made a nice two player physics based game, with some neat gameplay mechanics and a real co-operative feel to the gameplay. It was very nicely polished, and looked visually impressive.
If I was to have any criticism of some of the titles on display it would be the lack of polish, but really that would be unfair of developers new to the work of making games to a fixed time-scale! Certainly the results are very impressive for the 10-week project, and the students involved all seem to have enjoyed the game and coped well with the pressure they were under.