Melt Awardees
Inside the Game: From Player to Producer
by Jacob Habgood and Sumo Digital
Inside the Game is a video game that transports you into a fantasy studio where you can learn the craft of game development from the colourful characters within. Lose yourself in a creative adventure, and discover that the skills you’ve learnt along the way can be used to make games in the ‘real world’ too.
Games have become a ubiquitous form of creative media, but the technical barriers to taking part in this art form have traditionally been too great for mass audiences. This boundary-pushing concept would bridge these barriers, by allowing players to learn how to create their own games while actually playing one. In the role of “The Game Maker’s Apprentice”, their character seeks to win favour in a development studio like no other. It exists within an appealing fantasy setting where the world of game developers merges with the strange worlds of the games they develop. The studio is more like a magic castle than an office, providing extraordinary challenges for the apprentice’s burgeoning programming skills. There’s a lot of mischief and mayhem to be caused programming the studio’s defence systems, alien machinery, and even domestic robots. But everything is not as it seems, and there are a few surprises in store as the studio’s characters begin to suspect their own lives are part of a game.
Intriguing gameplay naturally blends with challenges that teach principles of game design and programming logic. These same skills can then be used to create complete games in the ‘free-play mode’ to share with other users of the system.
This project is a collaboration between Jacob Habgood and Sheffield’s largest game-development studio, Sumo Digital.
Photograph by Shaun Bloodworth