You’ll be working alongside some of the most talented artists and coders in the industry to create games big and small for some of the world’s most famous publishers, broadcasters and brands on various platforms from iOS to web to PC to console.

We want someone who is able to create game designs that innovate, not just imitate, who can communicate their ideas clearly, who can design the detail of levels and balancing as well as the top-level picture and, preferably, who is able to prototype their ideas in Unity, Flash or other authoring software.

You will be able to find the fun in a game, and present it to players clearly and efficiently. You will know when to fight for an idea and when to explore other options. You will be able to write design documents as well as build levels and concepts using an engine.

If this is you, contact simon@littleloud.com attaching your C.V.

I wasn’t just there for the free badges, though. On Saturday, I participated in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun game jam – a frankly terrifying event where a dozen or so developers were given a theme, about six inches of desk space and one hour to produce a game.

I’m delighted to say that I made something that I was pleased with, that the audience seemed to enjoy and that didn’t break when I attempted to demo it to the 300 or so people in the room. I don’t want to give too much away, but the theme was “resurrection” and it’s a take on the typing tutor genre.

You can play Awake here.

The whole experience was terrific fun, and I strongly urge you to check out what the other developers got up to – without sounding too soppy, it’s genuinely inspiring to see what people can do with an hour and a bit of determination. Both Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Forbes have great write ups.

We knew from the start that we wanted to push the boundaries of digital comics with this project, to make it 3D and to make it cross-platform. With this in mind, Unity was the obvious choice. We’d used Unity to build 3D games in the past, including Transformers 3 and Iron Man Upgraded. We’d never built anything of this size and scale before, but we were confident that Unity could handle The Thrill Electric.

The early stages of the project consisted mostly of tool development. The key points we focused on at this stage were:

• Frequent builds. This was vital to a project of this scale, as it allowed us to create test builds when, for example, new dialogue or art was supplied. Frequent builds allowed us to see any layout problems early on.
• Automation. What really makes a project of this scale feasible is the ability to drop content into the engine without manual tweaking. The ability to extensively script the Unity IDE allowed us to create a pipeline that allowed us to import artwork, backgrounds, animations, video, sounds and dialogue with ease, meaning that we could quickly respond to updates to the art or dialogue.

Focusing on these areas, we created a robust engine and pipeline that allowed us to automate the creation of 90% of the pages, with only a few very rich scenes requiring special treatment. Once we’d laid this groundwork, we then moved on to achieving the aesthetic effects we wanted – for example, the multi-layered 3D layout, the playful camera effects and the bespoke animations.

Development of The Thrill Electric wasn’t completely smooth. The sheer size of the project – over 10gb, at one point! – caused some technical problems. However, the Unity team were supportive throughout the process, helping us to work out the causes of crashes, suggesting changes to our workflow and so on.

In addition, we faced specific challenges when exporting such a large, rich project to iOS. We had to be very careful, when optimising the comic for iPhone and iPad, to retain the user experience without sacrificing quality. In particular, this meant focusing on texture optimisation . Having experimented with many options, we found that, in this case, an external tool (PVRTexTool) offered better compression and image quality than Unity’s built in tools.

We have a few recommendations for anyone working on a project of this size and complexity in Unity. First of all, check the Asset Store for plugins. Plugins can save you days or weeks of development time, and popular ones will already have been robustly tested by a large user base. Plugins we found helpful on this project included:

• EZ GUI, a solution for user interfaces that works cross-platform
• Sprite Manager 2, for easy control over animated 2D graphics
• FingerGestures, a tool for managing multitouch gestures across multiple platforms

(Although please note that things move fast, and that there may be better solutions available now.)

In addition, we have more general tips for working on a project of this size. Asset Server was absolutely essential to the development of The Thrill Electric. It allowed us to work collaboratively, provided robust version control (allowing us to roll back to a working version if errors were found) and is fully integrated into the Unity environment.

Unity have recently introduced Cache Server, which is designed to ease the pain of working on very large projects in a team environment. It works with Asset Server to reduce the time taken to switch platforms – which, in our case, took around eighteen hours for each user towards the end of the project!

Following the completion of The Thrill Electric, we’ve enhanced the Lumi comic book engine further. Lumi can now handle a wide range of enhanced comic formats across multiple platforms, and features an unlimited number of pages, panels, sounds, videos, bespoke animations and even Augmented Reality interactions.

You can view all 10 episodes of The Thrill Electric on the web here, or download the app for iPhone and iPad here.

We at Littleloud sponsored the Brighton outpost, providing beer and pizza to the developers, artists, musicians and designers who turned up to create games in just 48 hours.

I can personally vouch for the fortifying effect of the beer and pizza, as I was one of those developers. I took the following tweets as my inspiration: “You know in cut scenes when it says 3 months later…? What if the game ACTUALLY locked your save file for 3 months?” and “What if games rewarded you for believing rather than winning?”. From these, I came up with a gentle and melancholy adventure game starring swans, which takes place over six real-time days. If that description hasn’t put you off too much, you can play Six here.

Our Technical Director, Iestyn, also made a game. Taking “Just imagine for a moment that you could actually take CONTROL of a door” as his inspiration, he created a game in which a murderous door gaily flings office workers to their deaths. Built with Unity and PlayMaker, it features AI, pathfinding, physics and at least one truly terrible pun. You can play Murdoor here.

At six o’clock on Sunday, everybody showed off what they’d made. The games made in Brighton included a text adventure about a pigeon, a baby-comforting simulator and a beautiful adventure game featuring a sinister kite. You can see all the Brighton games – and indeed the rest of the MolyJam games - here. It was, not to sound too sentimental here, really inspiring to see all that creativity and hard work and collaboration pay off.

Then we all went home to dream fitfully about code and swans and possible bugs. Or maybe that was just me.

The Brighton event couldn’t have happened without the awesome efforts of Edd Paris who organised the whole thing, Jo Summers who provided invaluable ground support, The Skiff who let us use their lovely venue and Relentless, our co-sponsors. Oh, and everyone who spent their really sunny weekend indoors, making ridiculous games, of course.

“What would Molydeux” image by Joe Kowalski

Our session was on emotion in games – and, more specifically, how games designers can bring the narrative and mechanics of games together to create emotionally resonant moments for the player.

Long story short, we’re interested in making the player feel like they’re there. We think that a good way of doing that is to make the player feel the same thing that their character is feeling, by playing with the mechanics of the game. If the protagonist is meant to feel shocked, shock the player as well – do something new with the mechanics. If the protagonist is meant to feel anxious, stress the player out by giving them a time limit.

We mentioned a few games that we think do this well – including Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy VII and Braid – and spoke about our 2011 game Sweatshop, where we used a similar approach to create conflicting feelings of guilt and pride in the player.

Most of the sessions were recorded, so we’ll let you know when it’s online. Till then, there’s a write up of several of the sessions here on Rock, Paper, Shotgun (which includes a startlingly accurate drawing of us talking).

Photo of Simon Parkin by Natalie Seery. More photos of Bit of Alright here.