Open Day Post-mortem

So it’s been a couple of weeks since the last post. Sorry about that. This was due to 1) being very busy preparing for Open Day, then 2) being very worn out following Open Day.

I’ll talk about both of these below.


First of all: Open Day went really well!

A choice of games!  

We were set up beside the Games and Interactivity degree information booth, so there were a lot of people over the course of the day who wanted to talk about the degree. What it was like, what was required to get into it, what were the job prospects at the end, those sorts of things.

Now it’s been … a couple of years since I finished high school, so I don’t have too many memories of going to open days. It was interesting seeing the different questions being asked by kids, versus what their parents wanted to know.

There was also a pretty steady stream of people playing Level Squared. Unfortunately I was so busy talking with people about the course, that I didn’t get a lot of chances to note down what I saw from people playing.

Finally there were around half a dozen people who spoke to me saying that they had been watching the Game Awards last year and had seen us win the Student Game award, so that was pretty cool.


All-in-all we were on show for around six hours. We also did set up and bump out before and after, as well as talking to people for the whole day.

I’m pretty introverted, so it takes a fair bit of effort for me to be out and about and sociable for that amount of time. And the outcome of this was that I was pretty much out of commision for the rest of the week, hence no blog post (see I called this a post-mortem cos I was dead tired, geddit).

It really took me most of the next week to work out that that was the case, actually. I spent the next couple of days feeling really lethargic and lazy, but didn’t make the connection until around Thursday. Up until then I was feeling pretty down on myslef for not getting anything done and for not acting on any of the feedback that we’d received. Once I finally worked out what was going on, I rested up and began to feel better again.

Anyway, the lesson is to work within your means, kids! It’s all too easy to work yourself into the ground and get yourself sick, so make sure you look after yourself cos it’s going to make you more productive and healthy in the long run!

It has also meant that there hasn’t been a huge amount of progress on Level Squared since the Open Day.

I’ve written up notes on changes that I want to make to some of the levels, but I might save that to go into next week.

However, there was quite a bit of good feedback from the build that we had, as well as a few silly bugs that we really should have noticed but didn’t. But, yeah, that’s a much bigger post and I’ll write that up properly for next week.


Finally, we have some public appearances coming up in the next weeks!

  1. A few of the team will be presenting a panel at Animaga this weekend. They’ll be on Stage 2 on Saturday from 1.00-1.30pm talking about our experiences as students and becoming a studio.
  2. We’re going to be bringing a build along to the next IGDA meetup on Tuesday for folks to check out and try to break.