I’ve been in Edinburgh for the past three days, working at Dare Protoplay at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival.
For those of you that don’t know, Dare to be Digital is an annual competition in which teams of students create games over a period of ten weeks. The event I was working at allowed the public and a panel of judges to play the completed games and talk to their creators.
On the first and second day I was working with Phil and Ryan in the lobby area.
Phil.
Ryan.
We spent most of our time directing people downstairs to Dare Protoplay but when it was quieter we got a chance to check out the rest of the EIF.
There were various Nintendo games being promoted, including Cooking Guide for the DS. Which meant free food for us almost every half hour.
The application itself looked interesting and well designed, but I’d be too scared about spilling something on my DS to use it as a cooking aid.
Also being displayed was a demo of Little Big Planet 
From the short time I got a chance to play, the game seemed to live up to all the hype I’ve heard. It was easy to use and looked fantastic, although there were a few problems which will hopefully be ironed out by its October release.
Johnathon was made to dress up as Batman to go and hand out leaflets.
These plastic mannequins were dressed with kilt-towels which were constantly falling down until someone eventually found some duct tape.
In the afternoon we were working and unfortunately had to miss a screening of Introversion’s upcoming game, Multiwinia. I followed Ryan along after it finished and to our surprise Mark and Tom took the time to chat with us and offered us a private screening. We were talked through a King of the Hill match, in which the aim is to to get more of your Darwinians from spawn points into certain areas of the map than your opponant. Crates appearing throughout the match make combat more interesting by supplying your team with something to aid you and your Darwinians can be used to capture further spawn points. You can see how this could quickly become fairly become complicated which is where generals come in – they give orders to your men such as making sure the newly spawned are directed straight towards the correct area. Suffice to say, I can’t wait for the game to be released, and I’m off to re-play Darwinia in the mean time.
Ryan should probably be considered the king of getting hold of free stuff. Over the course of three days, he found:
- Many packets of pacman sweets.
- Guitar Hero T-shirts.
- Press goody bags including a Gamer’s Guiness Book of World Records.
- Edge magazine.
- Countless pin badges.
- 4 Talent goody bags including a 2GB flash drive.
- Gamestation goody bags including 3 t-shirts and a load of Xbox 360 stuff.
He also met and introduced us to ‘Sam’ from Codemasters who was really friendly and eventually asked up to shut down his 360s after he went to catch a flight.
On the second day we were hoping to go to a talk during our lunch break on the Pandora but unfortunately the person who was supposed to be speaking failed to turn up.
Instead we met Mario…
…and Phil and Ryan offered him some mushrooms.
The third day Phil and I were working downstairs trying to sell some t-shirts. Unfortunately with all the free ones being given out and the fact we were trying to sell white tshirts to bunch of people dressed only in black, it didn’t go all that well. However it did give us a chance to check out the games.
We stayed to help pack up after the event but thanks to members of the Dare to be Digital teams packing a lot of the stuff away it didn’t take to much time.
If you want to find out more about Dare and play some of the previous games, check here.
If you want to know the three winners of Dare to be Digital 2008 check here – I met Brian Baglow several times at EIF without actually realising he was the same person who writes ScottishGames.biz >.<
