With ComSoc having the AGM soon I thought it be important to say I will not be going for the Game Development Coordinator role next year. Instead, I’m going to be building a whole new society on the role. The reasons why I think that’s a good idea take a bit longer to explain. In true computer science style I’ve decided to make a blog about it. So here are a list of reasons I think it’s a good idea. If you’re a computer science student and/or someone in the university interested in making games, please read on. People who aren't into making games but are into making software please read the * at the bottom. Also, I have added animal gifs.
About The Role
I had three objectives for this role
- Teach skills
- Encourage entrepreneurial spirit
- Build a community of developers
Teach Skills
This university provides such a great computer science course. It gives Hull ComSci students the ability to make great things in their free time, publish them and maybe even sell them. We do well to teach the things we do in first year. The idea was to work from where the course material left off. I wanted to facilitate the desire for students to learn and do more, or just want learn about something different. There’s many skills I learned important to making games that didn’t come from the course and that’s no failing of the University. This is an industry where you have to care to be in it. A part of of that is going beyond what’s expected of you.
Encourage entrepreneurial spirit
What made the biggest difference to me in my first year was this massive need to build something and release it. I even made weekly or whatever blogs that are still up and available to read about. They’re too embarrassing for me to read now but the work I did there is the biggest contribution to my first class grade in my first year. It gave what I’m learning some context and it all began when I started going to what ComSoc did for game development sessions back in 2013.
Build a community of developers
There are some exceptions to this rule but generally the greatest games are not built alone. They’re built with a team where ideas and concepts have been shared. As each year brings in a larger number of students getting to even know these other people you could work with will be more difficult. Some central series of events where people can meet each other and decide they could do great things together is something truly powerful a society could do. Three Thing Game does some of that work but I want to see it taken further. Additionally, I want this community to spread to local developers outside of University who want to know more about the skilled individuals we have. Your skills are greatly valued and where you could be when you graduate will be down to both the skills you have and the people you know.
Reasons For The New Society
So now I’ve said what should be the outcome of the role why does it need to be it’s own society? Why can’t I or someone do all those things within ComSoc?
Time
One of the things that disappointed me greatly in this academic year was how little I was able to do as part of my exec role. ComSoc encountered significant speed bumps as soon as the year began which not only affected fragfest but also what I wanted to do with game development sessions too. The most precious resource this speed bump affected was time.
My role involved identifying when I was free, when as many people as I could figure out who wanted to go (gauging who was interested being it’s own task) were free and when a computer lab was free, ideally not in the morning and not after 5pm and not near another comsoc event. From there I had to book those computer labs and could get onto the actual work. The first part was figuring out the average level of knowledge of someone who would turn up and trying to facilitate that. To make the sessions worthwhile I wanted to get a planned talk and series of events to make up around an hour. Doing this properly requires a significant amount of time beforehand which mainly came down to developing the thing people would make and rehearsing the process to come to the right timeframe. Then comes the speedbump which in a perfect world could be done long before but ComSoc events clustered to Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Our current setup involved USB sticks and works as a quick fix with a drawback of being a massive time sink to setup.
My situation with time wasn’t ideal to begin with and will be better next year but the amount of time needed to develop something good enough to spec for game dev sessions was far exceeding the amount of time you can expect an exec to put in into their role. Put simply, there needed to be more hands for the job. A group effort working together to set up and deliver something meaningful. In order for a group effort to work, some leadership and guidance is needed which makes the difference between having a larger number of game dev execs and having a society in its own right with some organisational structure.
Focus
I love our computer society. Some of my best friends at my time in Hull are thanks to ComSoc with its socials and me very drunkenly shouting the names of the people to both introduce myself and memorise such wonderful people. After being with it for so long I can say one of its greatest weaknesses is the lack of focus it has developed. The name of the society itself should be the easiest way to describe it but that’s not the case. Being honest our name as computer society is only relevant in that we use computers and that we have some level of interaction with the department of computer science. However the future exec team announce this is no business of mine but I’ve read some strong points of building a much more focussed game development society you can look at here and here. Having this core concept be separate to the computer society benefits both parties. The game development society can focus on making games and getting developers networked and the computer society can focus on further facilitating the ever growing esports base. I believe there are people in HU that have the passion and drive to build a computer society that really puts esports on the same level as sports. That is the future, I hope we get to it first.
Brand
While focus was about a society cutting down on the fat regarding what it does, branding is about effectively communicating to everyone what it represents. With enough work, a games development society can be sold really well with a clear vision and mission statement to anyone interested in what it does. It’s something simple, we like games, we make games, we want people who make games to know each other. I first believed the magic of ComSoc was that we did everything but over this year I’m not so sure.
I also want to be responsible for a society and market it as effectively as possible with a fresh image and approach to getting known. We haven’t done our best in getting ComSoc known out there beyond our hugely successful fresher’s fair. I’d be making sure the game dev society is out there with anyone who could be interested in it knowing about it and what we believe in.
Computer Science Relations
Firstly, while the idea of doing this had been in my head for a very long time the important push to truly think about it came from Simon Grey in the department of Computer Science who also believes a dedicated games development would be a good thing.
Additionally, there’s much more space to get help from the department when we can promise what we do is developing skills and employability rather than just recreation. Nothing is certain but I’m hoping a game development society will get more help from the department in the next academic year than the computer society ever could. This hope comes from the amount of value what we do would bring the computer science course.
From one of my jobs and my role as a course rep and ComSoc exec I’m already quite affiliated with the department but I believe it won’t be until a game development society has its own image that cool things truly happen.
Union Relations
The Union itself would also recognise a game development society differently with hopefully some enthusiasm from the Union to help build a society aiming to develop very important skills to a course. It would also mean if resources are requested from the Union it would be from this new society and not ComSoc. ComSoc earns a decent amount of money from membership but it has to be careful where it dedicates funds. This new society would be very clear that all funds go towards furthering the experience of people interested in making games. I’m hoping that can go towards hosting events and subsidising costs for visits (like EGX or Rezzed which have awesome developer talks) or even helping people from industry get to us to do a talk and get to know what we do.
Diversity
One of the most important things I learned across all the projects I've worked on is the value of sharing ideas across different people. Having the game dev aspect limited to just me kills the room for ideas to grow and expand to something great. There are some things people would think that work wonderfully in a game development society and I'd really never know about them. I think that would be a massive shame.
If We Fail We’ll At Least Know We Tried
Ultimately, one of the most compelling reasons is “why not?”. Sure, as some older members (older than me) will say there was a gaming society and game making society (not their names but unimportant) that merged with the Computer Society catchall. Was this a good idea? Maybe. What’s important is we don’t know for sure if that is still a good idea as so many things have changed since then. As I have learned from being a course rep each new year in computer science can bring a totally different group of people with an overall different personality. Before I leave this university I think it’s worth finding out if the time is good to try something new.
So there’s my main arguments for making a new society. No TL;DR.
*A lot of what I said could easily apply to learning software development and not games development. I feel that making games is the best way to learn how to develop software as well but if you disagree I'm very for bringing different views to the table. The big aim is to improve the value of the computer science course in Hull. Anything to help that aim I am very happy to support.
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