General gaming discussion

Any company with a 'headquarters' in Dublin = Tax avoidance.

The Irish game development courses are unfortunately came about relatively recently and during the mobile game boom so that's what they focused on unfortunately. There was also a lot of snobbery from a certain professor in DIT that treated the game design students like **** while focusing on Apps. Ireland is just way, way behind the likes of the UK due to Ireland of course being late to the party, not introducing coding to schools, not introducing tax breaks to the industry before the UK.

There is however plenty of opportunity to start a games company. Almost did so myself until I got sucked back into science, always wonder if I should have started one. There's funding out there if you can go begging investors and lots of college graduates that a hungry to do something interesting. I did notice a lot of the games companies here were run by animators. They seem to have more drive to start their own business but don't really understand the industry which is usually their downside. It's worth going to an Irish game jam or indie showcase, there's some good projects, just too few get made. And you are almost guaranteed to meet John Romero who is a great supporter of irish devs.

Lots of ideas narrowed down to two that would have been feasible. I wasn't going to buck the trend with mine but one idea was a ninja gaiden/strider/hagane type 2D platformer with tonne's of bosses like a Treasure game. Would have had a dodge mechanic with i-frames. Tried to make it in my spare time but ran out of steam when I finished a vector based collision engine because you really can't make a game while doing another job, got severely burned out. Of course since then others have made games with my ideas so it's now totally unoriginal. The dodge mechanic would have been the same what a lot of indie platformers do. Cyber Shadow and Vengeful Guardian Moonrider was the type of game I was going for about 10 years ago.

The other was a rail shooter but using 2D sprites. Got as far as getting an engine in Gamemaker with scaled sprites and positions and orientation accurate and movement to their movements in 3D space. Not seen anything like this attempted but there's been a few starfox clones. It would have been like Galaxy Force 2 mixed with Panzer Dragoon.

I wasn't exactly making anything with groundbreaking mechanics like a Braid or Portal more making the games I wanted to play.

There's a massive amount of money still to be made but making a successful mobile game is now out of reach of the small indie Dev teams in Ireland. You can't make a successful app or game anymore with a tema of 10 or less.

There's way too much money and budgets involved. Most mobile games companies put out a huge number of games the majority of which will fail but they only need one to catch on and make them millions. I suppose you could get a job that is relatively secure working for one of the big successful mobile game publishers but it's hardly rewarding.

There's nothing but support studios in Ireland and not triple A teams. Best we can do are small indie Devs and I don't think these Devs really stand a chance of having a breakout mobile hit. I think they would be better served making a good indie game.

And as someone that worked in the mobile games dev environment, creating a mobile game is just as grueling as any other game dev project. Supporting a successful game might be a bit different.