Our Placement Program: Cultivating the Future of Video games in South Australia
As students we didn’t quite get the opportunities we wanted with placements, but once we started Mini Mammoth Games we decided to change that! Come through and discover how we here at Mini Mammoth Games are cultivating the future talent of the South Australian games industry.
During our study at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment many of us founders were able to participate in their placement program, enabling us to go out and experience the opportunities of seeing how our skills could be applied to real life jobs. Unfortunately there weren’t many, if any, game development studios that opened their doors to placements; something that we found to be disappointing and didn’t feel relevant or productive.
Therefore when we sat down to create a placement program we focused on what we would have liked and benefited from. This enabled us to make a few decisions immediately as to what we should focus on:
- Make a fun and unserious game
- Full experience – design, development and distribution
- Creating the marketing
- Receiving and analysing the results of their marketing
- Scope of projects
This worked out quite well and did help a lot with students’ understanding of scope, specifically for small hyper casual mobile games. This was something that we struggled with when we first started making games at MMG and is something that we have also noticed when working with placements.
Feel free to have a look at the games that the placements from 2023 made!
With the program being a success at AIE we decided to increase our reach and extend the offer to other universities. Starting with our friends over at Flinders University, next was the University of Adelaide and last but not least; the University of South Australia.
This is also amongst the various work experience and one of placements from either high schools or other tertiary education institutes that we did not yet have much contact with.
Doing this allows us to have a constant rotation of placement groups throughout the entire year, enabling us to give valuable experience to as many students as possible.
One of our placements from Flinders University, Adam, had this to say about his experience with us:
“It was a rewarding journey, in which I was encouraged to experiment, learn, and have fun every step of the way. I am thankful to Mini Mammoth Games for the opportunity, continuous support, and mentorship. Being exposed to the entire development process, from pitch to launch, has given me confidence that I now have knowledge and skills to contribute to the video games industry.”
Through our ‘Quality, Quickly’ process we are able to get placements to experience the full scope of development and marketing. Once they have developed their game we get them to create both image and video creatives to help market their game over the course of a week. Once completed we then provide the results and analytics to the students, allowing them to see which creative attracted the viewer’s attention best and the reaction of players to their game.
Our goal is to make the video games industry more accessible in South Australia; with such a tight knit community it can often be intimidating and a little off putting to those trying to get their foot in the door.
If you’re interested in taking part as a placement or on behalf of your students, please email us through contact@minimammothgames.com or go through our contact form. Furthermore, we often take placements in groups as this allows them to work as a team with a designer, programmer and artist; a minimum of 3 but we do take larger groups if needed. We are open to working with those who can’t build a full group, however that will be determined on a case by case basis and depending on our current and schedule placements.
We will be continuing our placement program for the foreseeable future and we would love to help you and others become more prepared for the industry!
With our former and current placements giving us positive feedback we are intent on continuing this so that students can get the best opportunities available. We have partnered with multiple educational institutes to reach as many students as possible and will continue to reach out to more throughout the entire state.