The AltDev Student Summit will be held November 10th and 11th, with the aim of bringing industry veterans together to explain to students the reality of life making games. Individually, many of us already do outreach to local education programs to provide these kinds of insights, so the Student Summit aims to centralise this effort by providing an online forum for this engagement – industry experts gain a much broader reach for their presentations, whilst students benefit from the experience of a much wider pool of potential speakers. As for all AltDev events, the intent is to hold the entire event online and record the sessions and share them with the community afterwards to further enhance the reach of the speakers.
For the Student Summit 2012 we intend to host presentations centred around two core themes:
1. All the Things You’ll Never be Taught - In this track, we hope to see professionals sharing their insights into the aspects of the industry that aren’t taught by game development programs, whether this be bits that aren’t taught, or bits that are taught in a way that isn’t reflective of true industry practice or some other angle on the topic. We want this track to help better prepare for life in the industry.
2. A Day in the Life of… - This is somewhat self-explanatory. We’d like to be able to give students an insight into the day to day routine of various different positions within industry. What does a Technical Artist or a Tools Programmer do all day? Obviously one talk won’t necessarily be representative of a single role at all companies, but we hope it will give students a flavour of what to expect.
If you have an idea for a presentation that doesn’t fit within the two themes, we’d still love to hear about it, so we have also included an “other” category for you to propose your presentation in.
Key Dates
Proposal Deadline – 19th August
Notification of Acceptance – 10th September
Event – 10th November
To submit a proposal for the event, please complete this webform, including your name and contact information, a summary of your past speaking history (if any) and a description of your proposal.
Finally, we intend to invite students to submit their current projects as part of a third theme, centred around the students doing a live presentation and demo of the project, followed by industry experts providing feedback and critique, in a format not massively dissimilar to the “Dragons Den” TV show. If you would like to be a part of this, please complete this form.
Questions can be sent to submissions@altdevconf.com