Dare Blogs – Digital Knights

What’s your game?

Joust! is a Kinect game for Xbox in which anyone can become a mighty knight! The game allows you to joust against your friends on split screen and compete in grand tournaments. A quirky medieval world awaits, creating a compelling gameplay experience for children and adults alike. Take control of your lance with one arm, while slapping the back of your horse with the other arm to speed up.

Will you be able to control your steed, aim at the right spot and defend yourself to become the mightiest hero this tournament has ever seen?

Bring your whole family to Dare ProtoPlay, join us and become the jousting champion of Dundee 2011!

What has the Dare experience been like?

This is Dare to be Digital, a unique mixture of crunch and fun! Do I want to be here? Yes! Do I want to work long hours each day? Yes, most probably! But shouldn’t I enjoy the summer?! Argh!

Seriously, Dare has been a tough challenge so far. Seeing other teams around you, we are constantly under pressure to outperform ourselves. Working hard for long hours suddenly does not seem good enough, and you push yourself even further. I have never worked so much in my entire life during one week! Still, it is immensely rewarding to see your ideas come together in such a short time, and see people laugh every time you tell them they have to slap their back. If we are able to keep it up, we will present you a fun and exciting game at the end of this competition!

What have you learned from Dare?

Personally I think Dare provides young game developers with one of the greatest opportunities to hone their skills outside of a University environment.
The feedback provided by mentors coming from the industry is invaluable, and it helps us to remain our focus and makes us re-evaluate our product constantly.

As a project manager, I learned how challenging it can be to keep tensions between team members in check. We are all striving towards the same goal, still all of the Digital Knights come from different cultures and backgrounds, with all the advantages and disadvantages. Although knowing my colleagues from my ongoing MSc in Games at the ITU Copenhagen beforehand, we never worked together before. Mediating between everyone so they feel comfortable under stress has been demanding. This is the kind of soft skills I learn here which they don’t teach you anywhere else.

From a more technical perspective, Dare allows me to see how the skills I have learned and taught myself during my former education hold up in a competitive environment. What can I contribute to the team that holds up to the standard of quality presented by other teams? The quality everyone is aiming for is clearly higher than that of your regular university course, and Dare helps to put my skills on a professional level.

Are you looking forward to ProtoPlay?

Most definitely! ProtoPlay will be the time when we can reap the rewards of our work. Seeing other people playing your game is one of the reasons why I am in the games industry in the first place. Giving the guests an experience in which they enjoy themselves is the goal we are aiming for, people having fun playing our game is the reason why I am able to work as hard as I do.

It is not easy to get that much public attention by yourself, ProtoPlay offers a great chance to do just that. We will put up a good show at Dare ProtoPlay and make visitors, as well as industry professionals, remember us!

You’re interested in our process?
Come visit us!

joustthegame.com
facebook.com/DigitalKnights
twitter.com/dare2011dk