Tag: TZresidents

Another week, another Tentacle Zone virtual event for our residents. Last week’s talk covered UI style development, with a touch of UX chat to boot. Our speaker was Martin Darby, an established UX & UI consultant who has worked in games for more than 15 years.

Martin has lent his experience to some of the biggest names in UK development – the likes of Jagex and Codemasters – so we were thrilled to get his perspective.

It can be hard to navigate these challenges, so we were delighted to welcome Nicolas Eypert to the Tentacle Zone to share his experience with us. Nicolas is a true veteran of the industry, starting all the way back in 1989 as an Amiga programmer at Ubisoft.

We were delighted to welcome Francesco Abbonizio – experienced art and creative director – to the Tentacle Zone for a talk exploring different techniques for conveying narrative in games without resorting to NPC dialogue and text heavy exposition.

We were delighted to welcome Erol Kentli to the Tentacle Zone last week for a talk on art bibles and the communication of aesthetic intent. This was a fabulously detailed talk covering Erol’s art direction philosophy and outlining his framework for successful art leadership.

Our speaker – Jan Vaněček – joined us all the way from Czechia where he works as Design Director at mobile studio Geewa. Jan has a long background in both mobile and console / PC development so we were excited to hear what he had to say.

Guido’s talk – “How the creative process really works” – looked at the ways that games are usually planned in the industry and explained why planning out projects during a proof-of-concept phase is a pretty terrible idea.

Ralf’s talk tackled both the benefits and pitfalls of prototyping, and answered some crucial questions that all teams should ask themselves at the very early stage of development: How can you define the goals for your Core Playable and what exactly you want to achieve in a meaningful way?

Why are some teams brilliant at innovation and others aren’t? What are high performance cultures actually doing with their time? Why am I working all the time and yet I don’t feel very productive? These were just some of the questions tackled by Simon Sparks – our guest speaker for this week – in his talk titled “The Secrets & Habits of Cultures That Innovate Fastest”.

Upskilling can have tremendous benefits for both the success of your studio and your team’s job satisfaction and overall happiness. So it was brilliant to be able to welcome Jenny Muhlwa – Sumo Group’s Head of Learning & Development – to the Tentacle Zone to share her insights on the topic.