MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Hello ladies and gents and welcome to GallantCloud Games!
We are a brand new start-up game company and are in the privileged position of working with the Microsoft Ventures UK team on their accelerator pilot.
The team is made up of five guys who have wanted to make games since getting their podgy little fingers on their first Gameboy, console or computer. We are all Train2Game students, working to create beautiful little games from the safety of our bedrooms and garages when we escape work (or the kids).
We entered a competition that popped up one day on the Train2Game student world, and after phone calls, meeting and deliberations we, the lucky few, were put together.
We then had a bit of a mountain to climb. We needed a name and with a name a logo.
This proved to be harder than anticipated, with all five members contributing to create a very unhelpful list of a hundred names, all of which weren’t quite perfect.
After many late night Skype calls and much cursing we had it! Now… just to create a logo.
So there we were on September 9th. Five chaps who hadn’t met as a team before got together at Central Working to meet the other brilliant teams who had a place on the Microsoft Ventures UK pilot scheme.
After the initial meetup and layout the hard work began. We jumped in at the deep end, having to pitch a so far non-existent game to a panel of industry professionals in just two days time.
After a shaky start and some incredible training from the Microsoft team and its partners, we managed to pull off a pitch. The rest of the evening involved chatting and sharing a drink with some great people about our new company and how we should go about forming what we are doing.
Following some great advice, we organised a game jam for our team. Held at Central Working and with the theme of sound, we took over several desks for 24 hours and went about creating our game ‘Monster Night’, finding out how well we worked together as a team and learning where each others strengths and weaknesses lay.
The next week brought some more excellent training and more ideas of how to structure the company and made us think about what we want to deliver to our customers. It also brought some new ideas for potential games that the team felt passionate about and that we put in the ‘to do’ design pile.
We were also invited to take part in the Develop Quiz. Aside from from the dodgy ‘reversed songs’ round It was an absolutely brilliant night and GallantCloud went head to head with some extremely talented game developer teams, with some brilliant stories shared and yet more great advice for the team! We decided not to show all of the other teams up and positioned ourselves a sly third from the bottom on the scoreboard…
We managed to get some more design and concepts done throughout the rest of the week, even managing to create a rough prototype of one of the games, sparking ideas for how it will work and what type of things we could add to make it AWESOME.
The first two weeks have been incredible for the team and we have an exciting time ahead of us. We would love for you to follow our journey through our blogs!
