It was quite interesting for me to look back from the path I’ve taken all the way from A-level to being involved in the serious games industry. Children have a much wider range of subject material that’s more related to computer games then when I was in school and the college even have software such as 3Ds Max and Adobe After Effects installed for the student to use. It is very impressive to think that when they coming out of the college and into university, they will be more than ready for the steep learning curve ahead. I wish I had 3Ds Max when I was in school. 

During the workshops we introduced the group to the games industry, some of the games we have made, and gave them a general insight in to how we, and the games industry work. The pupils were then introduced to the Microsoft platform PopFly, which is a great interface to learn the basic logic and behaviors simple games have. After playing some of the games and ripping them apart, the pupils then looked at planning and creating their own game using the platform.

The final session was spent polishing the game, and talking about how publishing and marketing works in the industry with some real life examples of our games. The pupils seemed to really enjoyed the sessions and the school plans to introduce similar workshops to more pupils in the future.

For the weekend, I hung up my business hat and went along purely as a geek. I ended up working on an idea called Citipedia. Originally submitted by Dundee based designer Lyall Bruce, Citipedia was a platform for giving communities more information and ultimately power over the space around them.

I chose to work on this project because I loved the vision of creating a fun ’simcity like’ interface for people to explore how wasted space could be better used. My contribution to the project was a Flash based editor, that used googlemaps to display an real space which users could then add different terrain and features ontop of and estimate the total development costs and time - in the future we intended to add counters to additional measure the environmental and social impact.  

This editor formed part of a larger social networking platform allowing users to share their ideas and utimately create change. We should hopefully have the full application online at somepoint but until then you can >> Start Planning.

Since, i’ve been developing other projects, learning all about Adobe Flex, and myself along with Cora, and Stuart from Fluid Pixel have also been involved in several game making workshops – i’ll talk more about this some time soon! I’m also looking at ways to improve the Ideonic website; you should see some new features and some changes in the near future. One new feature is the Our Team section, with a little insight to the people behind Ideonic.

We will all be contributing more to the website, so keep an eye on our blog or simply bookmark our RSS feed to see what we’re up too .