Learning on the job: How Buildersbrew is helping gaming students at the University of Northampton
Rob Lambert, Programme Leader for Games Design and Senior Lecturer in Games Art at the University of Northampton, explains the thinking behind Buildersbrew - a new company aiming to give graduates an advantage in the competitive gaming industry.
At the university there are 3 courses - games art, games design and games programming. Each year we have a graduating group of between 45 and 70 students who graduate from our gaming courses.
We have a really good employability rating and plenty of our students have gone on to work in the games industry.
Our intention from the start is to get them employed in whatever capacity they want. We have had students in the past who have worked on games such as Forza, Minecraft and Red Dead Redemption. Last summer's graduates have secured work at games companies like Playground Games, Rebellion and, of course, Buildersbrew.
Our students from these courses also go on to specialise in other areas, such as XR, Augmented Reality or Serious Games. One of our recent graduates is now working at Roxor Gaming, a Virtual Reality development studio in the south of England. Others have gone on to lecture on games design at colleges partly so they can upgrade their CVs to apply for jobs in the industry.
Buildersbrew
We want to increase the employability of our students even further so we've set up a limited company called Buildersbrew.
The thinking behind the name is that we're building tech and brewing up ideas along the way.
We're hoping to give as many students as we can opportunities to work on paid projects where they're receiving a financial reward for their time and effort.
The idea for Buildersbrew originated when I worked with Iain Douglas, who co-founded Digital Northants in 2018, during his time as a lecturer at the University of Northampton.
Iain was trying to line up projects for students to use their skills and we started to get projects that were funded.
We worked on the Business Fire Safety Awareness Tool for the National Fire Chiefs' Council with a group of students that called themselves 925 Studios at the time. We also created an Early Years Virtual Environment and a virtual reality swimming with dolphins’ proof of concept for VR Therapies.
Since then, we've started to do app development work for the Chester House Estate, creating opportunities for digital interaction, historical and heritage representation. There will be a virtual trail as well as augmented reality, to show visitors how the site would have looked in the past. That's a £10,000 project that was originally a grant from the University to prove what could be done.
This project involves other UON staff: Rob Howe, Helen Caldwell and Emma Whewell, as well as many others. We're employing 3 individuals alongside myself to work on that and we're aiming for it to be finished in time for Merged Futures in June.
We're also starting a project working alongside Northamptonshire Police. They do a county schools challenge each year and the winners this year were Northampton School for Girls, whose students wanted a gang awareness game to be created. So we're starting production on that with a further 3 individuals we're employing.
Cutting out the middle man
We found that we were constantly employing through Unitemps, which is owned by Warwick University. A lot of the funding we were getting for projects was going to a middle man, into the legalities of hiring or admin like contracts and timesheets.
Buildersbrew is trying to provide further opportunities for our students and graduates to work on live projects and be paid to do it, instead of that money going off to other areas. We're trying to improve employability within the games courses by providing funding to pursue their own games ideas.
If we can get finance from multiple areas, we can help students with their own ideas. We had a group this year who made a game together and they went to apply for funding from Tranzfuser, which is a national talent programme. We want groups like that to have the option to apply for funding from us as well in the future.
The hope is by creating this company, we'll be able to go for commercial work and tenders which we wouldn't be able to do as part of the university. We'll continue to look for government grants and research projects, and working within the academic sector allows us to be privy to those. We want to release games for entertainment as well in the future, as many of our students gain experience in this area during their studies.
Zero to hero
The games industry always asks for live or paid experience when graduates apply for roles.
Having this on their CV will really help them to gain future employment because we want to give them that foot in the door into the industry.
Quite often employers will feel that taking on a graduate is a punt because they haven't got enough experience to show.
So how do they show they’re one of the elite graduates in the country?
We’re realistic that they won't be the finished product straight out of university - it'll take a year or two in their first role after graduating to embed themselves within the industry. A lot of our students come to us with zero games development experience when they arrive at the university. We have between 70 and 90 weeks over the course of 3 years to turn them into someone who is a professional in their work.
Of course, skills vary from individual to individual - whether that's 3D Art, UI design or Gameplay programming for example. The way Buildersbrew works gives our students something else to motivate them. If they do well in a certain area and a project comes up that requires a certain skill, my colleagues and I will know who to go to as their lecturers.
If they're good at character work and hypothetically, we need a Roman soldier created for the Chester House Estate project, for example, my colleagues and I identify who might be the best fit for that work among our current students.
We're still in the early stages of applying for funding to get the business started properly and we need to create things like a website and a logo. One of our long-term aims is to have a physical location, whether that's at the university or somewhere else.
In the meantime, we'll work with anybody! We want to be connected to as many people as possible and we're looking to work with anyone on anything relating to game or app development. AR, VR, XR - any scenario where we can create a digital product.
Anyone who chooses us is contributing to the future of Northamptonshire.
Want to know more?
Find out more about Game Development courses at the University of Northampton.