Dare to be Digital (How does it work?)

what exactly did you want to know, Ronan?

There’s whole thread on last year’s comp – incl. posts from then current and past participants, as well as my own experiences as a judge – and it includes lots of detail

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It is my understanding that you can enter up to 2 years following graduation

something like that, i think it was 1 year.

dare was prob the best experience of my life, and most definitly the best summer too.
if u got any questions still, pm me and il see if i can answer any of them.

check out http://www.daretobedigital.com too.

AFAIK, its one year after you graduate, though officially you dont graduate until the whole ceremony thing, which is October/November/December, so you can be pretty much 2 years out of college and still apply.

Dave

I think its 1 – 2 years after, at the judges discretion. Its also only 1 – 2 members, everyone else should be still in uni.

Its definitelly worth a go Ronan, and if you win the marketibility award you could be offered free office space for a year in Dundee to set up your company. ( Well thats if there is any free anymore ) Its definitelly starting to be recgonised by companies in the UK now and its something useful to have on your cv. Winning the competition gave me lots of oppurtunities. My first job came from Embryonix ( the people who run the competition ) recommending me to a company set up by past winners ( who still exist ) and future interviews were gained from the competition on the cv.

You’re mistaken, 1 entry for the republic, one for the north

Leaving the concept up to the artists might cause problems, some of the ideas which I heard last year we’re completely unrealistic for the Dare time frame. You really ought to get into a team as early as possible so you can, at the very least, give a technical insight and ensure it isn’t totally off the wall.

Surely you’d stick with the Reality Engine, as you’re familiar with it. Silver Tongue made good use of it last year so I don’t see why you it could not be used again. I would be of the impression that using models you’ve bought defeats the purpose of the competition as it doesn’t show off the skills of the team as a whole, but then this would be up to debate and I’m not sure of Dare’s own standing on the subject.

I cant imagine the use of 3rd party assets being allowed…

With regards to Royalty free content, I highly doubt that every team created their own textures from scratch?
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Speaking for our team everything was created from scratch with no royalty free content (textures were taken from around dundee city). Speaking from my own personal point of view it kind of defies some point of the competition for me personaly as the competition is supposed you give you a idea of what its like to work in the industry with deadlines to meet, and just using ready avalible content kind of spoils the whole experience of producing your own IP with in the given deadlines . BUT…as I said before, the judges will be looking at a 100% polished games, so It dont matter if the game is just one room with only about 10 textures in it, as long as it looks completed.

Sounds cool, but if the purpose of the competition is to give you an idea about the industry, then its rather foolish to think that outsourcing content in order to meet deadlines is not an option.
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Yeah by all means, I wasnt suggesting that it wasnt an option, in fact we probably would have benefited in the long run if we did do that

some of the other teams did outsource such things as audio, A.I. and i think some 3rd party programs such as poser/deep paint were used.

simple fact of the matter is, the competition is aimed mainly for students. and not all students have that kind of money to splash out on 1,000,000 poly normal mapped characters or textures or advanced middle ware. as rosdahale basically said, it is supposed to give you an idea of what it is like to work in the industry. what are you going to do if your main goal is to work as a character modeller or visual effects artist for a company, but your team decides to outsource that section of your project because they have the resources to do so??

Yes i agree with you regarding the future of the industry/outsourcing, but to a degree. eventually these firms will be bought out by the larger studios, to elimanate competition.

The teams in this competition are regarded as professional students, but i highly dought if they are all seen as future professional companies.

The competition tries to simulate the work environment of say a classic small game studio. Most people entering are looking to get a job in the industry eventually.

Think of the end demo as a resumee. Saying i outsourced such and such isnt what you want to do on a resumee, unless your looking for managerial experience. Dare has a stake in your game if your looking at it from the standpoint of making a game to sell after the competition..

Plus there are prizes for best artist, best programmer etc.. outsourcing would make this a fuzzy area..

As they state on the Dare site, it’s not about competing with big companies and making the next Quake etc.. its about showing how you can utilise your versatility as a small company.. typically most games from Dare are quirky.. and unique..

Yeah kind of what I was attempting to bring across, its not just how you manage your work, a big part of it is showing your talent and basicly coming up with your own original IP and basicly not using or copying someone elses work. Some of the best games from last year were so simple and small, yet well put together.

Ok, if you were just going for the best programming award maybe you could do that, but to have a chance at winning I’d say pretty much all of it will have to be your own work. And don’t forget your gonna have six team members ! (international scholar) and a professional mentor in each department to help you out almost every day.

Plus you have to sign a contract that eveything is your own work and that the organisers from Dare own the content for the 10 weeks and some time after, so you cant really sign away someone elses work as your own

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Last year as part of my final year BSc Interactive Systems and Video Game Design Degree my team of student game designers from the University of Bradford, UK entered and were short listed in the Dare to be Digital competition.

http://www.insignia-game.co.uk

The toughest competition was in the Yorkshire region with 9 entries for 1 place.

We got great feedback and produced in the judges minds the best material. However our game was too ambitious for the competition. Also most of the team were well on out way to getting game design degrees which made Dare somewhat redundant for use anyway.

I have been asked to write a post mortem for the game entry for the industry website http://www.gamasutra.com.

I will place a link on this forum to that article when its up.

I am willing to offer my help to any Irish team looking to enter the Dare competition as it is a great opportunity and I have valuable experience. And the more Irish game design talent in the world the best able we are to show these edjits how to make real games.

Alan O’Dea

Hi Ronan,

I’m a purist believer in Dare, in that your work should be basically the 10 weeks work pretty much from scratch. However, we did bring in our engine that we had been using that college year. It wasn’t complete, but we did know it. We figured it was an even playing field, incomplete engine you know, verses a licensed engine you don’t know. However we were told that it would be considered more of an advantage we had come the judging.

However, as Dare has gone on, things have changed and people are coming in more and more prepared, people getting prepared for it up at a year in advance. In these circumstances, I wouldn’t presume your going to be going in with as much advantage as you might think with all your assets.
However, should you make your way to Dundee, when you go in on your first day and people see what you’ve got, that will be taken into account come the judging. Because you can’t expect a level playing field, your starting position is noted to give a fairer judgement at the end, so I don’t see you having a problem with assets you own.

The issue may come with the entry stages. You may be considered too advanced but I don’t know much about this stage, Idora would be the man to ask.

As for going in with an artists concept…as you said yourself, its not going to be pretty…

if you guys don’t mind I am going to move this to the events thread to keep all the dare threads together.

Aphra.

Nope go ahead!

As promised here is a link to a Gamasutra postmortem article for a Dare to be Digital project entry.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060213/odea_01.shtml