Hello everyone! I’ve been busy. Not with writing a book, like I was planing to do, but with something new. Creating a local game development scene from scratch, with the creation of the community “Volos, City of Games”.
So what is City of Games? How it started? What are its goals?
Let’s find out.
It started when I was doing my annual “am I following the best path to achieving my dreams” day. My dream is to create video games, (1) because I want to tell stories through them. It would take years to build my writing portfolio and even then there was no guarantee that companies would take a dedicated writer over a writer that had also created video games. If I was to one day create the video game of my dreams, I would need to start soon and go big.
Big video games are not created by individuals. Communication and teamwork are as useful a tool as anything I know about creating a story and video games. So the first step would be to find a team. Sadly, I live in Volos, a small city in Greece with no game development scene whatsoever and there is no option to move to a bigger city. I am stuck here for the foreseeable future. Well, I am not one to give up so soon. If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. I had to create a game development ecosystem in Volos.
But before I sinked hours and hours of work into designing how I would do that, I had to gauge public interest. So I went and created posters with the instruction for people to join a facegroup group. It took me about a month to create one that I thought was good enough. In hindsight I might have been procrastinating, scared of failure. In this month of work, exams on universities had started and my posters would be overlooked by overworked students with the thought “I don’t have time for this”. (2)
The first day after posting the poster all around the city, 1 person has joined the team. On the third day, another one joined. Along with two friends of mine, we were all 5 people. I got disappointed because my grand dreams would not come to reality. Let me acknowledge how wrong this was. Human, but wrong. Reality is all that we have and dreams are good but we shouldn’t get too attached to them. Even if I got 5 people, I shouldn't have been disappointed. They were much better than no one and I was lucky to have them. I could build my skills with them and next year do even better. I thank my friends for reminding me of that when I told them how I felt.
But fortunately for my dreams, the story didn’t end there. The next day, 5 more people joined up and then another 3. Soon enough, the team reached 30 members and I was satisfied.
That started the next step of my journey. Designing a summer workshop. Here the story repeats itself. I took too long to design the workshop and when I did, most people have left for vacations. Did I need that much time to design it or was it perfectionism that got in the way. I’m inclined to say the second, but then again, I don’t know what would have happened if I just jumped right in. Maybe I wouldn’t be ready. (3)
A side effect of walking the road that would lead to my dreams, is that I got a job offer. Someone from the University of Thessaly is planning a technological literacy program for teens, that includes Robotics, Programming and yes Video game design. So when I told him that I’m looking for a place to meet with my team and that I was doing game design classes, he offered me the game design class. I’ve been unemployed for most of my life, so to get an offer like that is something that makes me feel like I am doing the right thing and I am not just chasing butterflies.
So where am I now? We have 50 members on our facebook group. I’ve completed my first summer workshop with 10 people in it (for more information on how that went, check out this blog post) and going for the second one. I am still looking for a place to meet with my team, but I hope that this will get solved soon. Lastly I am trying to prepare for the beginning of the regular team classes.
I will continue to document how this venture will go. For the second blog post, I’m thinking I’ll just describe the goals of the team and what a “good year” will look like.
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading!
