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BAFTA Youth Mentoring Programme
Ruben Farrus
Game Designer
“You could tell how excited the young people were to be able to share their ideas with you"
11 November 2009
Last week Ruben Farrus, one of our designers on Blue Toad Murder Files went to London to volunteer in The BAFTA Youth Mentoring Programme. This initiative is led by BAFTA, Media Trust and other youth organisations, which work closely to help unlock young people's potential. In this scheme industry professionals have the opportunity to share their skills with 13-25 year olds working on media projects. The programme usually involves film and music projects but this year BAFTA decided to start a videogame-related course and asked some game developers to collaborate in it.
Ruben and other experienced freelancers and game developers from companies like EA and Sony Computer Entertainment volunteered to be mentors. The four-day course covered the basic principles of games development. Young people got an introduction to game creating software, creative concepts and level design theories. The budding designers worked hard during the four days to design and develop their games; they then had to present it to the mentors by the end of the last day.
Ruben explains that, although the sessions evolved around a specific game project, the main point was to offer advice, guidance and encouragement to the kids. “You could tell how excited the young people were to be able to share their ideas with you. The experience was more about listening, suggesting and supporting than actually teaching game design,” he says. “The kids were really eager to show you how far they got after four days of hard work and I think that the endless questions they were asking was a good sign of how much they liked this experience.”
At Relentless we think that it’s important to support this kind of charitable initiatives in order to develop the games industry professionals of tomorrow. We would like to thank BAFTA, Media Trust and all the other organizations involved in the programme for their fantastic work with young people.
If you would like to find out more information about the work of Media Trust and BAFTA follow these links.