December meetup
03/12/15
Wow! What a way to end 2015 with a record turnout to our first Digital Plymouth meetup at the Loft. With near on 100 people turning up to the event there was a great buzz and atmosphere for the evening as well as some fantastic speakers. Not to mention the Google cardboard freebies thanks to the team at Thinqtanq! If you couldn't make it check out the talk summaries below and be sure to sign up for the next meetup in March!
Let’s release a game
Richard has worked with some of the world’s largest game companies such as Lucas Arts and Psygnosis. Using his experience Richard talked about the peaks and troughs of what it is like building a game company. From hiring designers and developers to managing a team, Richard went through the in-depth process of how you can produce a game from start to finish.
There are big differences between building a game for yourself and building a game as a product for an audience and if you want your game to make money, the product route is the right way to go.
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Finding your balance
I think we all wanted to be something grand or fun when we were kids. But of course now we have bills to pay we have to get a little more realistic. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had two pretty clear passions, my love for surfing and my love for design. At this point the work life balance wasn’t a thing, but unfortunately, I had to grow up at some point.
When we talk about the work life balance a lot of people seem to think that it is some magical place where all your problems will be sorted. I’m not saying it can’t be that but in my experience and talking with others it seems to be a much more organic process that evolves as you do. I opted to take my favourite things and put in place a series of goals that would allow me to achieve them. For me it was my dream of working as a designer in the extreme sports industry by the beach. This time last winter I took my freelance work to New Zealand for 3 months, even picked up some Kiwi clients.
Of course I am not in anyway claiming to be super successful, but I would like to consider myself to have a great work life balance. You can’t always have the balance you want, but you can work towards it and if you can figure out the one thing that will keep you ticking throughout the plateaus of your career then you should be able to find sustainable happiness.
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Infinitely complex: A musing on language and how we use it around technology.
The work I do revolves around my ability to communicate and help people understand complex ideas. Almost everything I do when working with technology is ultimately invisible – hidden details and optimizations that only go noticed when they go wrong. This is how we package technologies. We hide the details – package things up so they appear to work like magic. I don’t think it’s valuable to compare this to magic. We all like a good trick, but a good trick is meant to make you distrust what you just saw.
We are challenged more than ever. We live in a world of uber, driverless cars, amazon delivery drones, and a world of encryption, government and business surveillance. Everything is making a massive impact on the way we work, buy and are governed. Everything we do to day is digital. Every part of our lives is touched by technology somewhere, even if we don’t see it first hand. We need to be able to understand and comprehend this, especially as it transforms the world around us. To understand is to be able to trust and in trusting our technology we will be open to change that can continue to positively impact our world.
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