We’ve got professionals from the games industry acting as mentors for the teams during the GameCamp. We grabbed four of the on Saturday evening for a quick update.
Neil Holmes from Blitz Studios:
Guy Wilday, games consultant:
James Rogers from Microsoft Games Studios:
And last but most certainly not least, Andrew Fray from Codemasters does battle with the lift. Why the interview is being done in the lift is anyone’s guess.
Friday, February 19th, 2010A few tweets from the #x48 hashtag that caught my eye and I felt deserved being blogged completely out of context. If you think this sort of thing is fun-fun-fun get over to Twitter search. Oh yes!
Currently in the lead on for most arsey tweeting is SinEstelle from Derby. Can anyone beat her/him?
They’ve been at it for 4 hours. Tempers aren’t frayed, fights haven’t broken out, heads haven’t been banged on tables. They are, however, a little sick of the likes of me sticking cameras in their faces (my vox-pops are being added to the Vimeo group and the Microsofties will be editing theirs over the weekend) so I just did an ambient survey over some shoulders.
It’ll be interesting to compare this with tomorrow afternoon…
Friday, February 19th, 2010Birmingham’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Michael Wilkes, dropped in for a visit and revealed himself to be genuinely interested in what was going on having been a programmer in the 70s. Here’s a bit of footage of Toby Barnes explaining the whole GameCamp concept to him and the Lady Mayor.
The mayor promises to mention X48 on his blog later on tonight.
Friday, February 19th, 2010Here’s B.U.G.S.
And here’s then introducing their game concept at 2pm on Friday.
Friday, February 19th, 2010Photos are going up on the Pixel-Lab Flickr account. Here’s a slideshow of the X48 2010 set:
Feel free to use them for whatever use you may find useful.
Friday, February 19th, 2010Before the coding kicks off there were talks. Not too many talks, mind. Here there are (apologies for the poor sound in places).
First our host Peter Rayson from Birmingham City University welcomed everyone:
followed the obligatory health and safety stuff which I didn’t record but it was actually rather amusing. Then we had Jason Hall from Screen West Midlands who talked about Game Central the regional games network for the West Midlands.
Next Toby Barnes from PixelLab revealed the theme for the GameCamp to be Discovery.
And finally Andy Sithers from Microsoft talked about the Imagine Cup.
And then the game coding began!
Friday, February 19th, 2010Here’s a little taster of what will be happening during the event that kicks off tomorrow at Birmingham City University’s Millenium Point Campus…
FRIDAY
11:00 – Registration
11:30 – Introductory Talks and revealing of THEME in Room 244!
12:30 – Grab yourself a sandwich and a drink
13:00 – GO!!!
20:00 – Pizza Pizza Pizza Pizza Pizza Pizza
Sleep? Who needs sleep? (Disclaimer: if you do need to sleep, there are rest rooms labelled near to the coding area)
SATURDAY
08:30 – Breakfast (in the café behind the GRUB N’ GAMES room)
12:00 – Lunch
15:00 – STOP!!! Everything must be handed in by now, with everything packaged up as instructed)
15:10 – Present your games to the other teams while the judges make up their minds…
16:00 – Prizes awarded
16:30 – Homeward bound! Eat. Sleep. Don’t code games for a day or two. See you next year?
T-shirts are being made, posters are being printed, banners are getting ready to be hung. Pizzas are ordered, fry-ups are approved, and soon we’ll make the first Energy Drink Run. We’ve already booked the van for that 
We’ve also rounded up the now infamous X48 GIANT BEANBAGS that you may have seen starring in one of FailBlog’s most viewed videos.
So we’re just about all set for X48:Birmingham at Birmingham City University’s city centre campus at Millenium Point. It all kicks off at 11ish when we’ll be set up to register all the teams and get them fed and sat at machines.
The theme is also set. In a moment I’ll be writing it on a piece of paper, putting the piece of paper in a gold envelope, and putting the gold envelope in a safe in a secret location until a week today. Until then…
Friday, February 12th, 2010Within three days last week all the available places at the Birmingham edition of X48 in February were taken. Gone. Completely. We weren’t going to open registration to the Huddersfield edition of the event until late this week, but so many people were e-mailing us desperate to get a place the we did, and over the weekend most of those places have gone too.
So now, unless there are cancellations, there are only places for 2 or 3 teams at Huddersfield’s X48 in March. Hurry Hurry Hurry!
Monday, January 18th, 2010
