The following interview appeared as an extract in BAFTA's official 2022 Awards brochure, which is now available on Issuu.
What happens when a BAFTA Young Game Designers super team enters a climate change-themed game jam? They showcase their game at COP26 and to royalty, naturally.
INTERVIEW & WORDS: Toby Weidmann
BAFTA/Scott Garfitt
Climate change is front page news, but communications on how and what changes we should make are often complex and confusing. One way to encourage positive action is through engaging storytelling, and this was the challenge set by Abertay University for a game jam sponsored by SSE Thermal, themed around carbon capture technology. Four students teamed up to create a climate action game, Net Carbon, that would not only win the jam but also go on to be finetuned and displayed at UN climate change conference COP26 in 2021.
It feels like Young Game Designers is one big family to me at this point
All four talented students are former BAFTA Young Game Designers (YGD) alumni, namely Harry Petch, Cam Tuliao, Jaime Williams and Jordan Han. “It feels like YGD is one big family to me at this point,” says Harry, whose connection to the BAFTA competition goes back to 2016 when he first entered the Game Making category at the age of 14.
Harry’s journey into games started “comically early,” he laughs. “When I was three years old, I’d sit on my grandfather’s lap and watch him play solitaire on his old Windows XP computer. I knew I wanted to make games long before I actually was able to do it.”
Slowly but surely Harry moved away from just writing down “silly ideas in my many notebooks” to more practical engagement, particularly learning to use the development software GameMaker through helpful YouTube videos. Armed with this new knowledge, he made his first ever game. But there was a problem...
“I couldn’t get it to work,” Harry admits. “It was just a black screen. Eventually, I realised I had accidentally set the background colour to black and so my little round objects, which were also black, didn’t show up. I was going to fix it when I realised I could make this into an interesting platformer, which became the prototype to Illuminate, the game I submitted to YGD in 2016.”
Harry was more than delighted when he found out he had made the short list and attended the ceremony with his parents. “It was great but I kind of set myself up for failure because I was so concentrated on the award,” he recalls. Alas, it wasn’t to be. “I didn’t win but I’m now friends with the guy who did, Charlie [Thurston]. In all honesty, his game was better than mine. I felt awful at the time, but I eventually realised it was actually recognition of the fact that I was able to take a good idea and execute it. I did get a week’s work experience with Media Molecule out of it.”
Some people might have stopped there, especially with exams on the immediate horizon. But Harry decided to give YGD one more go, working with Louis Jackson, another 2016 entrant, to create Tempo, part top down shooter, part rhythm game. They were nominated in 2019, this time in the 15-18-year-old category, but again just missed out on the top prize. Even so, “it was incredibly validating, because it showed that my success with Illuminate wasn’t a one-off. It was a real confidence booster,” Harry says.
Once again, this is where Harry’s connection to BAFTA might have paused, but he found himself back again for YGD 2021, having been unknowingly nominated for the Mentor Award. Inspired to create an after school club for his fellow pupils, sixth former Harry set up a game development club, “with the idea of kicking open the door to opportunity early”. Leaning on what he’d learned himself through YGD, the club was created to give students a good foundation in game design, teach them the core skills and help pitch their ideas. As Harry says: “I wanted it to be a really nice safe space for geeky teenagers like me to do something creative and put a bit of themselves out there. I was really happy with how it went.”
Happy would seem to be an understatement – across two years, eight of his students in six entries made the finals, which led to Harry subsequently winning the Mentor Award in 2021. “It was a big shock,” he laughs. “But it was very satisfying.”
Inevitably, Harry won a place at Abertay University to study game design where he reunited with some of his fellow YGD entrants. And with that, the idea of a YGD team came to fruition. “I already knew Cam, who had won YGD 2015, and Jordan and Jaime were both nominated multiple times. Jaime was in the same year as me. We’ve always wanted to meet up and make something,” says Harry about how the YGD super-squad assembled.
COP26 was overall a very valuable experience and we had some lovely feedback
And so Net Carbon was born, a game jam was won and the fantastic four found themselves heading to COP26 to showcase their game in the Green Zone to the likes of Jamie Hepburn, Minister for Higher Education and Further Education. “We created a game that we all felt had some nice nuance. It had these vignettes that explored the carbon capture process and engaging minigames. It was quite simple but we were happy with it... COP26 was overall a very valuable experience and we had some lovely feedback.”
Earlier this year, Harry was invited back to BAFTA 195 Piccadilly to present Net Carbon to HRH The Duke of Cambridge at the first official event to be held in the fully redeveloped HQ. The event was a showcase of new talent and included the launch of a new career development bursary in Prince William’s name, as well as the announcement of a new tier of membership for emerging practitioners.
It’s not every day you get to present your game to Prince William. It still feels a little surreal, but it was awesome.
“It was great to chat to the other BAFTA beneficiaries about their journeys,” Harry says. “And it’s not every day you get to present your game to Prince William. It still feels a little surreal, but it was awesome... He’s really interested in the arts and what BAFTA does to give back to people. It was a real morale boost for our team and added that little extra bit of validation.”
If you don’t win, it’s not a bad thing. You really should see it as a celebration of what you can do.
If it hadn’t been for YGD quite possibly none of this would have happened. “The important thing about YGD is you have to put yourself out there,” Harry concludes. “That can be a scary prospect, especially for young people, because they feel like they’re being judged. But it’s not about that. If you don’t win, it’s not a bad thing. You really should see it as a celebration of what you can do... I would love to continue working with BAFTA, helping to promote talent and build opportunities. I was given that opportunity, and I think there are a lot of other people who deserve that opportunity, too.”
Find out more about BAFTA Young Game Designers here.
