STRAYLIFE

We were approached recently by someone with a game idea who was interested in getting it off the ground in New Zealand and seeking some advice on where to get started. We thought we would share the advice we sent back, which went a little something like this:

• If you want to gather more hobbyist developers to band together to create a game, then we’d suggest jumping on the GamePlanet and NZGDA forums to find people.
• If your looking for inspiration and like minded individuals to discuss your designs then the IGDA and GameDev are great places to start.
• If you’re interested in learning more about game development and getting into the industry, the MDS have a great education program specifically for games. Straylight has many graduates on staff from the Otago University (particularly the Comp Sci department), and Otago now offer a dedicated computer design course.

We hope it will help some of the aspiring game developers out there to get into the industry!

Its official: Straylight is on the ground and running within New Zealand’s largest Mecca. It might only be a small team weighing in at less than 100kg (including all computer peripherals and probably the desk too) but it’s not the size that counts… its how you use it. We hope to be expanding this one man show into a full, possibly design-based team in the not too distant future, so stay posted.

Presently and temporarily we’re hot-steppin’ it in the International Centre for Entrepreneurship (aka the Icehouse.) It is an open-plan office space that is full of similarly positioned ventures, all of which have global domination in their sights.

Straylight’s ethos of Meaningful Play has been well received throughout the office so I’d imagine that we are going to fit in quite well. Now that we are set up we are just working through a few teething issues but they are nothing a bit of technology and ingenuity can’t fix.

I know you are all interested in how the move from Dunedin to Auckland went. So in order to save the time of me telling you, I compiled a short montage of how I managed to cram my life into the back of a station wagon and drive 1353km in 17.52 hours:

Hayden’s Auckland tip of the episode: Always carry an umbrella with you to work. You never know when liquid sunshine might happen.

*(Pretty Good Read)

Today Straylight bid a teary farewell to Melinda, an MBA student working on site with us over the last few months.

As part of her research project into strategic human resource and organisational management, Melinda decided to go one step further to conduct her research and actually became a part of our team, completely immersing herself in the world of Straylife.

Mel has been a welcome addition, quickly fitting in to our way of life. She could be found jammin away on Rock Band on a Friday evening, sharing a joke with the developers and even taking part in our ‘Reboot Camp’... parts of which she found the toughest challenge of the entire experience.

As Mel heads off to China, we wish her all the best and look forward to hearing of her ongoing success.

Updated – Parting words from Melinda:

“It was a great pleasure to work at Straylight during my three-month project period. I was extremely delighted to be part of the team and have everyone’s support.

Straylight is a great place to work and I realy enjoyed my time here. I wish all the best to Straylight and I will definitely miss…..’Friday Pizza and Beer’ :-)”

A few months ago, there was an email passed around about being an ambassador for the technology education sector. I thought it looked interesting, so after discussing it with the futureintech team, I decided that it’d be a good thing to get into.

Basically what it involves is going into schools and giving talks to those that are interested in what I do for a job.
Because I love my job, this is pretty easy. What I try to do is give the kids a good idea of how their study is used in the workplace, and I try to get them to be game developers… It’s pretty much just a sneaky way of recruiting future Straylightians.

The most useful part of what I’ve done so far, (as far as I know) are the question times. The students ask me anything from “What’s your favourite game?”, to the kind of subjects they should be taking if they want to follow a particular career path.

Most recently, I gave a presentation at Otago Girls High School – a surveyor and I talked to one hundred year 13 students about what we do, and how they too could get involved. The response was to be expected – one hundred very quiet year 13 girls and a lone cricket.

I think that the current paradigm of computer games doesn’t initially draw girls to the genre of entertainment, and I don’t think that it has been a common aspiration for girls when they think about what kind of career options are available to them. I talked about all the different ways one can get involved in the computer game development industry, from concept art to graphic design, experience design, producing, graphics programming, 3D modelling, texturing, AI, etc…

Hopefully I inspired some to aspire to a career for a computer game dev company… or at least opened it up for consideration.

With development for the new site underway, and self-enforced milestones looming, it was time to start tying down some of the ‘loose ends’ on the site.

Most of the content and imagery was pretty straight-forward – we had numerous existing images, press content and project documentation to transfer, jobs to get up, and a back log of blog content to kick off. Potential blog ideas had been thrown around, but no firm decision had been made as to which of those would make the final cut.

After a series of unsuccesful ideas (including a ‘Relationship Advice’ blog – from a bunch of gamers), and time rapidly slipping away, a late night session saw two finalists emerge. The first – designed to connect the oustide world with our home away from home – would be our ‘culture’ blog. The second would be related to development happenings, acting as somewhat of a “developer diary”.

The culture blog name was a give-in – STRAYLIFE. The term was coined by one of our freelance artists who, while working in-house, came up with a series of comics to illustrate our way of life at Straylight. Coming up with a name for the ‘developer diary’ blog, however, was proving a little more difficult.

So we put it through a rapid fire version of our usual design process. We kicked off with an all in brainstorming session to boot the name ‘developer diary’ and come up with something more… well.. us. Amongst those ideas gathering momentum were ‘the distant future’, ‘ASSERT’, ‘Binary Solo’ and ‘DEVel Up’. A short list was compiled, and the remainder put to vote. A sub discussion emerged about the fairness of the vote and how collectively we thought was best to conduct it… and once conducted, led to two clear favourites. More discussion, and a combination of the two came out – which landed us with one final name… ‘THE FUTURE SHOP’.

Satisfied we had all contributed to the process, we called it a day (well, we called it a meeting).

Then we found these guys