Catalyst Games - Term 3 Week 1

Catalyst Games 

Emma has six years of design, production and product management experience in the game development industry. She has qualifications in Game Design, Psychology, Visual Art and Interactive Digital Media. Her most notable titles include the award winning Star Trek Lower Decks game, along with Phantom Galaxies, The Red Cross’s Danger Days, Kinder World (a mental health app/game) and 10 of Mighty Kingdom and Moose's Shopkins games.Emma frequently speaks at industry conferences and events such as PAX Australia, GCAP, Adelaide Youth Film Festival, Technically Games and many more. She has provided mentorship and guidance to younger game designers and loves to support new entrants to the gaming industry.   

Emma will take the kids through creating the basis for their own video game with four workshops focussed on building and developing paper prototypes. There will be no screens for these workshops with everything completed on paper. Emma  will teach game design principles as well as industry relevant development processes in a way that is age appropriate to a spectrum of ages.  The workshops are modular and adaptable to different interests and while there is a core focus that each workshop aims to teach, each are useful and can be applied on their own or as part of a course.  

Week 1 - August 10th: Introduction to game mechanics. The first workshop focuses on introducing game mechanics based around the interests of the participants. There will be a focus on specific mechanics and then the opportunity to learn how to create a paper prototype through two iteration cycles with support from Emma.  

Week 2 - August 17th: Gameplay The second workshop introduces gameplay core loops which will extend the paper prototype into a functional game nervous system. Participants will learn how game mechanics can interact with each other and begin to extend their prototypes into necessary core gameplay.  

Week 3 - August 31st: World building A rich story and lore is important to any successful video game. The third session will teach the participants how to blend their mechanical game system into a world that is interesting and engaging to them.  

Week 4 - September 14th: Production cycles of games The fourth and final session will explore production cycles of games and what would happen next if they were professional game designers. We will explore the games they have made and talk about who they are for, what platforms and types of games they would be best suited for if they were to be released and how they could develop their prototypes further if they had different intentions for where they want their prototypes to go.  There will be a lot of fun in this session as we learn to play each other's prototypes.