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Perth Games Industry Community Profile (March 2009)

Front cover:

community_profile_cover-blog1

Excerpt:

The Perth games industry has seen massive growth recently, with over 50 new industry professionals added to the local talent pool in the last two years. With such quick change, it is vital to ensure that changing needs are met and new opportunities are capitalised upon. As part of the Let’s Make Games initiative, we hope to coordinate with local industry, government, and educational institutions to ensure that this growth can continue at a sustainable and productive pace.

The first step in this process is to assess the characteristics of the local industry and identify pragmatic measures that can be undertaken to facilitate organic growth. With that mind, we conducted an online survey of the Perth Games Industry. This document describes the data collected by the survey, and outlines directives that we will pursue as a result.

About the cover:

The cover includes a screen-shot from “Ladybug Garden”, a locally developed game by Jack Casey.

Jack is a Senior Programmer at Interzone Games, Perth’s largest game development studio. Prior to joining Interzone in its early days, Jack was a business software developer who started writing games “under his own steam” with a colleague.

Ladybug Garden was created in 2 weeks for the August 2008 Game Jam, a local initiative in which participants are challenged to create a game around a surprise theme. Ladybug Garden was also entered into the Nullarbor 2008 (a local games competition) where it won the Judge’s Choice Prize.

Jack described the process of creating Ladybug Garden with the following:

“I really enjoy working in this way. Having a theme as a starting point, a fixed time frame and others participating alongside you really helps with creativity and motivation.”

Like many local developers, Jack has a very broad skill-set outside of his area of most expertise. Aside from programming, Jack also developed the game design, wrote necessary software tools, and created all art for the game.

Download this report:

Update: Fixed a few links. Thanks to Josh Stewart for reporting these errors.
Update: Corrected graph and grammar in Current Involvement section. Thanks to Simon Boxer for reporting these errors.