Newport university holds first games development workshop

Year ten students from eight Newport schools have become the first to use a state-of-the-art GBP 50,000 computer suite in a games development workshop organised by Newport university.

The two-day course showed its young participants how to put together the story, characters, graphics and music to their own game, letting them sample what it's like to work in games development.

"The computer games industry is one of the biggest in the world and events like this help to give young people a taste of what being a computer games designer is all about," said Dr Mike Reddy, programme leader for the BSc (Hons) Games Development and Artificial Intelligence course at Newport Business School.

"Newport's University has two courses that were developed by liaising with the computer games industry to meet the growing demand for graduates. We believe it's essential to maintain close links with the games industry to enable our students to successfully find jobs when they graduate. We already have graduates working for major games companies such as Sega and Blitz, and recently, we were proud to be the only Welsh venue in the first ever Global Game Jam, a worldwide game creation event."

"There are lots of opportunities for people in Wales to find work in creating computer games and Newport's University is one of the front runners in producing graduates for today's multimedia industries," added Steve Rowlands, lead advisor for education with Newport City Council, who helped judge the best game.

The overall winner, awarded a prize donated by GAME, was based around a boy transported into a war film and made to fire hot dogs at his enemies.