An Update: Student No Longer

So, it's been a while since my last update and unfortunately this is going to be a quick one but hopefully you'll understand why. Having finished my studies and graduated as evidenced in previous posts.

So, I figured it was about time to get a job, become a real games industry professional. The poor souls at Guerilla Tea decided to give me a shot and that's where I've been at for the past few months.

 In case the name is foreign to you, Guerilla Tea was founded a couple of years ago by a group of Computer Games MProf graduates at Abertay University. You can read all about their spotty, teenage years as a company in the profile on their blog.

However, I'd already been following them for a while and there are a few projects in particular that got me excited for working there. First, take a look at the work they did with ENABLE Scotland, a charity that works to make life better for people with learning disabilities.

On The Free Run, the product of Guerilla Tea's workshops with ENABLE Scotland

On the Free Run is a game made by a team of budding game developers going by the name of Lazy Boys, with the help of ENABLE Scotland and Guerilla Tea these guys developed a game concept and carried out through a full game released on the Android Play Store. You can read all about it here and here, or just download it and try it yourself:

More recently, you may have seen this press release by the folks at Cancer Research UK:

Cancer Research UK has hired games and software development agency Guerilla Tea to build the charity’s first mobile phone game to pinpoint new genetic causes of cancer – accelerating potential new cures.

Another exciting, innovative and somewhat charitable project for the guys at Guerilla Tea so that's why I was quite excited to get an offer to work with them. It's been a few months now and whilst I can't say much about what I've been doing, I can say it's lived up to the hype.

Just my cuppa tea...

Infact, I'm not sure if there is a better challenge for me, straight out of Uni. In the short time I've been here I've been working on, the aforementioned GeneGalaxy (working title) and a project called Knux. That's pretty much all I can say about them but it's had me looking at fields as varied as networking, cryptography, gameplay, physics and statistics from week to week. Which I find utterly fantastic, going through Uni you always expect a junior role to be you getting given all the small, easy tasks - so that you can't fuck much up. So, it really makes you feel valued to be given such a range of challenges from the off.

Anyway, that's my quick update - I hope to get a post up about a nice networking library I've been using recently soon but we'll see how busy work keeps me. ;)