January 31, 2010
Introduction
As a part of my University Course, I am required to complete a 9 month placement at a games company to gain valuable experience and a taste of what working in the games industry is like.
After finishing my second year in June of 2009, I spent the next few months contacting games companies all over England trying to secure a placement to start in September. It was reported that 95% of students in the previous year had secured placements either in the games industry or even in software development and I was optimistic that I could secure an internship at a top company.
unfortunately 2009 was not a good year due to economic circumstances and opportunities were limited to say the very least. It seems the industry was not willing to take risks and responses from companies were generally negative. I was lucky enough to get 2 interviews at different companies as some people on my course didn’t even get responses, however was unsuccessful loosing out to other students from my course. After applying to around 20 games companies and 30 software, I was unsuccessful and was considering moving straight to my final year.
During a meeting with some other students in September, we considered the possibiltity of setting up our own company and spending the next 9 months creating our own games. We talked with some of our lecturers about it and discussed possible funding options from schemes within the University. The fact that we would also have to be responsible for the business side of things was something that concerned me as I knew how much work and knowledge was required to successfully run a business.
We each went away and spent some time thinking about whether we could all commit to the idea of working for ourselves and what we all wanted to achieve during our time as a part of this project. For me there was a number of personal goals that I wanted to work towards as well as being able to get some solid programming for 9 months which would give me an advantage for the final year.
After deciding on the name “Identity games”, we finally moved in on December 1st, 2009
