Many of you will have seen the news by now, but for anyone who hasn’t:
That’s right, Level Squared was awarded Best Student Game at the Game Awards!
And there has been a very slight increase in our site traffic following that…
(see if you can pick the day the Game Awards were broadcast).
One of our team members, Steve, was there to collect the award and give a pretty spectacular speech as well, with a few well-deserved shout-outs.
However, he was pretty limited in the time he had, so I’ll expand a bit on what he got to say. Level Squared would not be the game it is today without the assistance of these people:
Andy Trevillian. Andy has been our teacher throughout this year. He’s given us a huge amount of support and guidance and had our backs the entire year. Back when we were working on FourShadow he did his best to get us to pull it into some sort of playable format. Sadly this was beyond even his formidable abilities. But he didn’t give up on us, even meeting with us over the break to discuss where we were at and to encourage us to consider where we were and what we could achieve. When we made the decision to reboot, Andy warned us that we were up for twice the work in half the time, but he backed up our decision.
Joe Park, Laura Voss and Ken Wong. Joe, Laura and Ken were our tutors across the two semesters. They have all built studios and released games, so brought a wealth of knowledge to help us out. They gave us priceless advice on running our projects and designing our game, and were willing to talk to us about whatever problems or hurdles we were encountering.
Swinburne Games Staff. Steve Conway, Laura Crawford, Troy Innocent, Dan Draper, Mark Morrison, David Harris and all the other teachers and tutors we’ve had over our time at Swinburne. All the staff have been super supportive and encouraging and have helped us to learn and grow.
The Arcade. This goes out to both the venue for giving us a space to develop, and to everyone at the Arcade who played Level Squared, or were willing to talk to us when they ran into us. The community at the Arcade were super supportive and encouraging to all of us, and really made us feel welcomed into the Melbourne development community.
Bar SK. Louie and Dayve at Bar SK hosted Level Squared at two Work in Progress Wednesdays, giving us the opportunity to show Level Squared to a heap of new players and helping us to play test. I took pages and pages of notes at these play tests, and they definitely helped Level Squared to be a better game. They also serve really nice beer. And while that didn’t directly help develop the game, I enjoyed it a lot.
IGDA. Likewise, everyone who played Level Squared at an IGDA Melbourne meetup. These was some of the hardest crowds that we tested with, being made up of developers who knew how to stress test and break a game. It was great to track the development of Level Squared month to month as it became more and more difficult to break!
Everyone who has played Level Squared. Every time someone played Level Squared we took notes and made improvements. If you ever played Level Squared, thank you for helping us.
I’ve spent the last few weeks explaining what we are planning to do now that uni has finished, and what our plans are for Level Squared.
And, well, all of those decisions have been rendered obsolete now.
We’re going to have to get back together in the coming week and reevaluate all over again, now that we have a much greater profile and some pretty hefty industry endorsement.
So I guess the good news is that there’s going to be more posts in this series! Stay tuned for the on-going barely contained chaos that has been and will continue to be the development of Level Squared!