Dangerous Golf Brings Back Memories

It’s been five years since we did our first 24 hour game jam event. Since then we’ve iterated on the event several times, and I think we’re getting pretty good at them. The first one we did was proposed by xbox 360 magazine. You can see the article they published about it here:

Destruction Golf

That year I formed a team of some of our best students, and together (although I much accept the majority of the blame) we catastrophically imploded under the weight of our unrealistic ambitions. I think we learnt a lot though.

Anyway, that team of graduates got their degrees and all went off together to work for a company in Guildford called Criterion, who are responsible for the Burnout series as well as the Need for Speed franchise. Sadly, Criterion are no more, but rising from the ashes is a new studio called Three Fields. Their new IP is a game called Dangerous Golf, which seems to be taking an element fun-failure crash physics from Burnout and turning it into fun success – destroy as much stuff as you can with a flaming golf ball.

This looks like fantastic fun and personally I can’t wait until May when I can start causing havoc, and although it is most likely a coincidence it makes me wonder whether this new game is in some small way inspired by our first game jam in Hull.

Alumni in Develop’s 30 under 30

I like staying in touch with alumni. When I hear about all the fun and fantastic things our students have gotten up to since they left us it reassures me that we must be doing something right.

Today I heard that Hull Computer Science graduate, Unity evangelist and all around nice guy Josh Naylor has been honoured by develop magazine as being one of their 30 under 30, which is fantastic news.

I remember Josh started using Unity during our regular game jams, and through the contacts he made with Unity and Microsoft he managed to secure his evangelist job almost immediately after he graduated (or perhaps even before).

Now he’s been travelling the world talking about unity and doing us, and himself proud.

If you want to read about Josh, and the other young talent featured in Develop magazine’s 30 under 30 you can find out more here!

 

Alumni Games – The Room 3

Hull Alumni Tom was a student of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull some years ago now, and a bloody good one at that. When he left he jumped straight into a job with Criterion Games making Need for Speed: The Rivals. From there he moved with the title to Ghost Games in Gothenburg, and after cutting his teeth with Triple A games he’s moved to Fireproof Games, which is a studio based in the UK that focuses on (in my opinion) more creative tablet based titles.

Whilst Tom was at Hull he was a pleasure to work with, and it’s always good to see what he’s been up to. Recently that’s been a game for iOS and Android called Room 3. Here’s the trailer.