My First Experience as a Volunteer Keynote Speaker For Game Development

In this article, I just want to share my experience in sharing my insights with students of one of the universities here in my country in their Google developer club last 2024. It was an engagement that I got through a local game developer’s group from where someone posted that they were in need of a speaker to give insights to students who are beginners in the game development industry. I was really trying to work on writing this article before but a lot of plans I had to set aside for a while and I finally had a chance to work on this and take it out of my bucket list.

I wanted to write this article so that I can have a documentation of my game development journey as I try to learn the different things I need to learn in the industry.

Here are some of the things I had to prepare before the date of the engagement.

I’m pretty new in teaching game development, however, I did have 2 years of experience in working with a collaborative team of game developers who also helped me learn the basics of the industry. I wanted to explain to the students that there is an opportunity to learn in a wider community not limited in our local country.

It’s important that they develop not only technical skills but also their soft skills that can open up opportunities for them in the long run.I shared to the students my personal insights about game development that includes a little bit about my background as an enthusiastic person who loves learning.

I also shared to them the motivation I had in learning game development, and the journey I set myself as I entered the game development industry.

Usually, when I get to be invited to become a volunteer speaker and if it is a new topic that has been assigned to me. I would be working on practicing the presentation and record my self to note some items for improvement.

I maximize the use of my YouTube channel and listen to me discussing the topic assigned. I was really excited to share my experience to the new set of Filipino game developers and really appreciated the opportunity to share my learned experience with the young generation of my country.

This is because I was not privileged enough to gain mentorship when I was young to get into game development. I was lucky enough to meet like minded game developers, who I met through Twitter and an online course I’ve taken related to coding game development.

I am very grateful to my teammates from whom I’ve learned a lot and helped me grow as a game developer. This is why I want to echo the experience that I’ve acquired through sharing it to the younger generations of my country and community.

I also decided to get into putting up or at least setting up an official indie game studio name for myself as a solo developer in my country, and this experience further pushed me forward with my goal in trying to get started with having my own indie game studio. At first I named it Pintig Lahi games and with some deliberation with my friends. I have decided to name it Pintig Laro Games.

Here is the practice video discussion I’ve made for the speaker ship invitation for sharing my experience as an indie game developer. I hope you will learn something from this practice talk that I’ve made. Just one note, I’m practicing my talk in this video so you may notice it’s as if I’m trying to interact with the participants of the event.

This experience was really an important part of my journey as a game developer because it prompt me to get started with my future goals that I have now committed myself into really getting into indie game development as a solo developer for now, and perhaps in the future work on games that will be published on platforms that will be commercialized with the help of team mates.

For now, I just want to enhance my skills as a game developer as I try to develop “Datu’s Quest” which is my first indie game passion project that I hope to publish in a platform such as Steam.

If you are a total beginner in game development, I hope that this article helped provided you with some inspiration and ideas about the game development industry. Thank you for reading and taking the time to read my blog content.

“I had the opportunity to share insights as an invited volunteer speaker at the University of the East, thanks to the Google Developers Student Club. As Dr. Max from Spiderman said, ‘Any opportunity to expand the minds of young students is always a reason to celebrate.’ Moments like these truly remind me of the importance of contributing to the growth and learning of the next generation.” – Rodprogramdev

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