Dare Blogs: 8 Bit Guardians’ medieval turn-based strategy game

What’s your game?
A turn-based strategy game with a medieval setting. The game uses a hex grid as opposed to a traditional square grid. We designed the game with tablet in mind so it’s a lot simpler than your typical strategy game but still retains a lot of strategy and can be played a lot quicker. We like to say it’s a strategy game that non-strategy gamers can enjoy.

What has the Dare experience been like?
We’re all really excited at the prospect of competing against students from around the world. We’re still on cloud nine and can’t believe that it’s happening. Every email we receive just makes us even more excited to just get up there and show off what we’ve achieved.

The people from Dare have been really helpful; sending us emails about accommodation, inviting us to groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, sorting out mentors and providing answers to any questions we have. They’re really organised and the event is very structured. We’re really grateful that Dare chose us.

What have you learned from Dare?
Well, we were originally making the game for a university module so it was quite a full game from that. However, there was never the idea of releasing the game, it was purely for a grade, but doing Dare has opened up the possibility of eventually releasing it. 

We’ve learned a lot about what needs to be done to achieve that: proper time management and being very realistic about our goals. We’ve learned how to do proper playtesting and improving on issues we hadn’t realised. All of this has made us a lot more enthusiastic about eventually releasing our game.

Are you looking forward to ProtoPlay?
Yeah definitely. It’s always nice to have people play something that you’ve created. There’s a lot of satisfaction having people not only look at something you’ve created, but appreciate it also. We’re intrigued to find out what people think of our game and what we could do to improve it. Having a variety of gamers playing our game will hopefully help us understand what works, what doesn’t and what we could do to improve it.

What are your ambitions after Dare?
Well, being part of Dare is just delaying the inevitable job searching and elongating our summer; with that said, it’s a summer spent working on our game! So depending on how Dare goes, we all have our individual ambitions to go and work in the games industry.

We’re all looking at different job roles and at different companies, but hopefully Dare will improve our employability and offer a breakthrough into the industry.

Follow 8 Bit Guardians on Twitter @8BitGuardians and Facebook to learn more about their game.

Dare ProtoPlay and Indie Fest is on 13th-16th August in Dundee’s Caird Hall and City Square, with all 16 Dare student games on show, indie games, talks, workshops and more. http://www.dareprotoplay.com

Team members:

• Christopher Fagan – Team Leader – The University of Huddersfield
• Shaun McNair – Lead Design – The University of Huddersfield
• Ben Watts – Lead Artist – The University of Huddersfield
• Richard O’Hara – Lead Programmer – The University of Huddersfield
• Simon Wall – Programmer – The University of Huddersfield
• Charlie Hadlett – 2D Artist – The University of Huddersfield
• Robert Stavely – Environment Artist – The University of Huddersfield
• Rumen Petrov – Character Artist – The University of Huddersfield