Game Industry UK and Brochure

Project Brief

We were given a brief of looking into roughly 20-30 game developers based in the UK, we had two weekends to look into some companies and produce a file that meets the criteria of our research development and a game directory or map. It was quite interesting researching the companies and i found out a lot about the english game developing companies.

                                             Game Companies Information

4J Studios  

4j Studios is a Scottish Video game development studio founded in 2005 and located in Dundee and East Linton. The company has worked with a handful of publishers including Microsoft Studios, Zenimax Media and Mojang.

In 2012 4j Studios were awarded the Golden Joystick Award, a very prestigious award inside the gaming community, they received this for the best downloadable game, this being Minecraft for Xbox 360. Soon minecraft will be made on the Xbox One, along with other Playstation platforms.

They have made Star trek games, Banjo-Kazooie and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Lionhead Studios  

Lionhead studios are a British video game developer. In 2006 they were taken over by Microsoft Studios. Lionhead had great success with their first game Black & White, this was a strategy and artificial life game, this was published in 2001 by Electronic Arts. Their most recent game to be made was Fable: The journey which was released in late 2012.

They have been nominated for a lot of awards and won a handful, these were for creative aspects such as; Original story, Game design and Soundtrack .

Rockstar North  

Rockstar North, formerly DMA Design Ltd are a british video game developer located in scotland, there best known for grand theft auto.

In late September 1999 the company because a branch of Rockstar Games owned by take-two interactive. This is the main developer for the Grand theft auto games in cohesion with Rockstar games studios.

They have also been included in other games such as Max Payne and Red Dead Redemption.

Codemaster  

Codemasters is a company founded in 1986 and established themselves in the ZX spectrum market. They are based in Warwickshire UK. They mostly made action games which required to solve problems. They also produced games on many consoles such as the 8-bit Atari,  Atari ST and Commodore 64.

In the late 90’s to early 2000’s they were dominating in the gaming industry, on consoles such as the playstation2. To this day codemasters are still making video games.

Black Rock Studios  

Black Rock  Studio is a video game developer formerly based in Brighton, England. The company was founded in 1998 as pixel planet. It was later acquired by Climax Group in 1999 and renamed Climax Brighton. In 2006 Buena Vista Games bought it.

Towards the end of the companies career staff were faced with lay offs, this happened whilst making the game Pure, this was very successful     but companies turned down sequels.

Ruffian Games  

Ruffian Games was officially formed in December 2008.They have worked on games such as; Fable II, Crackdown and Project Gotham Racing. 

Ruffian games was mostly comprised of Realtime World Employees, who moved after the collapse of Realtime World.

In 2013 they announced that tribal towers had evolved into a new game called Game of Glens. This was announced with Square Enix new venture, in which one of the 3 titles is launched on a vote.

Facepunch Studios  

Based in Walsall, England this game developing studio was founded in 2004 and incorporated in 2009, it has made great success of its sole game, garry’s mod, the company has made £22 million from 2006-13. They don’t hold a big team just a low 11.

2013 saw the studio produce a new game in alpha called rust, this being a open world sandbox game showing aspects of garrys mod but in a more professional way.

Ubisoft Reflections   

Ubisoft reflections is a subsidiary of ubisoft, they first started developing games for the BBC micro and were quite successful in doing so. Most known for their game Driver which was inspired by 1970’s show starsky and hutch. This was fallowed by spin offs.

They have produced fames from 1984 all the way till the modern day with announcing a game they have been working on an will be released in early 2014, this game being a new driving game called The Crew.

Rocksteady Studios  

Rocksteady are a game developing company founded in 2004, in 2010 Time Warner. In 2009 Spike Video Game Awards gave Rocksteady the studio of the year award.

Rocksteady have become well known for their involvement in the batman games, although in the third batman game Rocksteady were not involved in the development of the game. On march 4, 2014 Rocksteady and Warner Bros. announced the next and final Arkham game which would be titled Batman: Arkham Knight, this will be released for xbox one, ps4 and windows.

Travellers Tales  

Travellers tales are a british videogame developers based in Cheshire England. Travellers Tales first started developing games for the Psygnosis. Which were most notable and were innovative in adding 3D effects to add realism. Song owning traqvellers tales helped the company tremendously, allowing them to produce several games with Disney Characters. They made games such as Mickey Mania, Toy Story and Finding nemo.

They were later known for their collaboration in the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, resulting in sonic 3d and sonic r. Travellers talers have enjoyed working on a vast amount of games for a long consecutive time, they have sold over 60 million games to date, won two BAFTA’s and one award for children’s videogame of the year.

2007 saw Warner Bros buy this company. They have since then created many lego games since this time.

Big Big Studios  

Big Big Studios is a videogame developer,. Some codemaster employees founded it in early 2001. The company was setup with help from parent company Evolution Studios.

Based in Leamington Spa in the UK, it gained a quick following by producing the game Pursuit force.

On January 10 2012, sony confirmed that has been proposed the closure of Big Big Studios, which eventually happened.

Zoe Mode  

This studio was formed in 2007 when it was rebranded from Kuju Brighton, which was in hand formed from the remnants of wide games. September in 2008, they made a London studio to take on more projects and take on more staff.  Later in 2009 they announced their san Francisco studio.

They were well known in earlier years for sing star and eyetoy. They have received many awards.

Recently using xbox kinect system they have made zumba fitness video games, which saw good reviews.

Rebellion Developments  

Rebellion Developments are a videogame developer based in oxford England, there first game was on the Atari and it was Alien vs. Predator, which was considered one for the best games for that console.

There more recent games consist of Sniper Elite V2, Metal gear solid.

Core Design  

Located in the city of derby, England, Core Design were set up in 1988 by ex employees of Gremlin Graphics.

They came to dominance when they were producing tomb raider, this debuted on the Sega Saturn platform ahead of the playstation. Sony saw the rise in popularity in the game and made a huge appeal to bare the titles of the later games.


Leaflet / Brochure

Pamphlet Evaluation

We were given the task of creating a pamphlet highlighting some main pointers of this somewhat new industry. We had to include information on the subject about the industry such as wage pays, job roles, main locations of the companies etc.

We were also put into random partnerships within the class something we hadn’t yet done.

The primary focus was on the information rather than the designing of the pamphlet. We had to delve into the industry and I felt I learnt a lot about it whilst doing this project such as; Basic information, Company information, Locations and many other things.

First of all I made a map and added pins to the locations of the companies to clearly show the reader of this, we had to research 20 plus companies so this took up a few hours.

We Thoroughly researched 25 companies learning about locations, games they have created and up and coming ideas. These we could not include in the pamphlet but two due to room issues.

Toward the end we decided on looking at job roles and the wages attached to these, this was really fun and quite surprising in some areas.

We then had to find a suitable lay out of out pamphlet, it wasn’t too hard but there were a few choices we could have gone with. Through out this project I feel I learnt a lot about the game development industry and created a suitable pamphlet for the brief.

In the end I was happy with the outcome, I think the theme of the pamphlet  really suited the target audience and went with the gaming side, giving it a real fun and sporadic look.