Powered by the Faculty of Engineering and IT, the UTS Tech Festival is a celebration of everything technology, creativity, and innovation. The festival brought together students, industry partners, staff, and fellow tech enthusiasts on campus across a jam packed program.
Hear from some of the organisers and attendees in the video below:
In this post, Jaime Garcia Marin recaps some of the more games-focused events at the festival.
PlayMakers Workshop: Game Engine Deep Dive
This event was a fireside chat led by Aryeh Zinn, a former student of the Games Degree, and an excellent opportunity for students to learn about the next generation of Rendering Techniques using Vulkan (a powerful Computer Graphics API).
Despite the high technical level of the presentation, our students developed a better understanding of how computers render games behind the scenes. The talk explained step-by-step how to talk directly to the hardware, which offers high levels of performance.
The workshop had a great level of attendance, and was a sold-out session with more than 60 current students attending. For a one hour session on a Wednesday night, on such a niche topic, these numbers are very good.
This event was made possible by working closely with the student societies and alumni. They are a very dynamic and passionate cohort of students that are very keen to engage in new challenges.
Workshop: Emerging Technologies for Data Visualisation (supported by NVIDIA)
This workshop was an industry talk by NVIDIA, the biggest manufacturer of graphics cards in the world, covering the latest development of Generative AI (which is possible thanks to the high performance chips they put in graphics cards).
For an event of this nature, numbers exceeded any expectations. We had more than 125 attendees, mostly students from the Bachelor of Games Development, the Masters of Interaction Design, Masters and PhD students from the Interaction Design discipline, among others.
In terms of the take-home message of the event, technology is developing very rapidly and AI has become part of our daily life. While most see this as a threat, the potential lies in understanding how these emergent technologies can have positive and impactful real life applications.
If you’re planning to organise something similar, here’s my advice: the key to success for this event was to engage with key players in the industry. NVIDIA plays an instrumental role in the gaming industry. Allowing our students to make connections with these tech giants is the first step towards greater employment and learning opportunities.
Check out the UTS Games Studio blog for more details and photos: Industry Talk by NVIDIA.
Gamers Guild: TechLAN Gaming Competition (supported by MSI Australia)
This 2-day gaming competition consisted of a social gaming day and a CG:GO 1v1 tournament, with a focus on online multiplayer first-person shooter gaming.
This event was very popular, with over 100 students joining the gaming competition. MSI very kindly donated a gaming laptop and a gaming monitor (RPP $3,000) for us to use as prizes for this competition. This generous donation and their presence at the 2-day event increased the levels of engagement significantly. The event was the outcome of a 12-week collaboration between NVIDIA, the Playmakers Student Society, the Gamers Guild student society and MSI.
48-hour Student Game Jam (supported by Dolby Australia)
Students were given a one-of-a-kind design challenge: create a game where player-player communication is the main mechanic. All in only 48 hours.
60+ of our top-performing students worked very hard on this challenge. To accomplish this, our industry partners from Dolby Laboratories taught us the most advanced features in their latest Dolby.io plugin for Unity.
10 student groups from 6+ very diverse disciplines within the university (IT, Engineering, Music and Sound Design, Games Dev, Computer Science, etc) have competed for 4 unique award categories.
- Best use of Spatial Audio
- Best Player-Player interaction
- Most Polished Game of the Jam
- Most Innovative Voice-comms Game Mechanic
We had a first year student that had graduate level technical skills. She in fact was the winner of the ‘Most Polished Game’ award.
This experience helped students to develop a great level of understanding on how to create games with spatial audio for online multiplayer games. All outside of the teaching session in a fun manner ?
UTS Student Games Showcase (supported by MSI Australia)
The annual Student Games showcase has been running for 7 years and keeps getting bigger and better. The idea behind this event is that attendees can spend as much time as they wish to browse through the different titles and play the games they like the most. It’s a self-paced and low-pressure setting for everyone to enjoy in their own time. This iteration of the Games Showcase was without doubt the largest event on our records with nearly 380 attendees.
This year, we had 30 student groups showcasing their games, 12 industry judges (all UTS Alumni) helping us decide on the best games of the night, 2 student societies supporting the event (Playmakers and Gamers Guild), and 2 industry partners sponsoring prizes for the winners (MSI and NVIDIA).
For the first time ever, we had a student game developed for the UTS Data Arena, which was very exciting. Five awards were given away to recognise our students’ hard work and the outstanding levels of sophistication in their projects.
The organisers of the Game Festival at SXSW attended the event and hand-picked the top projects to participate in their own student games showcase. A large showcase that aims at demonstrating the top talents from all the universities in Australia with a Games Degree. This is fantastic visibility for these groups of aspiring game developers that are only at the beginning of their second and third year.
Public-facing events are fantastic vehicles for connecting with industry and creating new opportunities for our students.