IGB400 Progress Update

This week / cycle's work was good! There were a couple road blocks, but it was overall a productive period.

The major change was that the document became a website. This came after the realisation that the word document I had created was truly horrendous, and awful to navigate. Instead, I have created a template of the website here:

https://emmacfindlay.wixsite.com/qldgamedevresources

Unfortunately, a lot of pages are still on draft and thus can't be accessed from this website. The website will follow a similar structure to the original document - with a variety of lists provided based on relevance to the developer, their business and their project - however the website structure will be left as the last task as all pages will be duplicates of the 'master list' page. This is because entries have to be put in manually on these lists and, if all pages are duplicates of the master list, I can just disable irrelevant entries rather than re-enter information hundreds of times.

I also got in touch with several people who either are running programs or may know of programs I had missed. Some of them did not get back to me, but I was able to continue my correspondence with Caitlin from SQHub and get in touch with Kim Allom and QUT CEA (Thanks Zac!). It was pretty morale boosting, as I found other people thought this could be an important resource and even recommended seeking funding to keep it updated!

I shortlisted the programs I found particularly relevant and/or useful. I ended up including 46 programs, excluding any programs I had found that were unlikely to include games (such as science and research focused grants), were unlikely to be open in 2020 or were generally dubious. Theses are the programs I hope to write up on the website. The list may expand as I hear back from people. It also may shrink as, through writing up the programs, I realise some programs aren't as relevant to start-up game devs on review. A few Advance Queensland grants have been eliminated because of this.

In terms of writing, I have only written up two entries - Advance Queensland: Ignite Ideas and Innovate Queensland. I had a few false starts with other Advance Queensland grants and had a few roadblocks when figuring out how I wanted to actually write these entries which, when compounded with the burnout from other units, considerably slowed my process. However, I've figured out my general structure and hopefully from here will be able to write each entry fairly quickly (with an estimated 15 - 45 minutes per entry). I've attached them as a word file to my blackboard submission as I couldn't attach them to this blog post.

For the next week, I am planning on writing for my 9 hours. After this, I will transfer things to the website and clean it up.

Finally, I am planning on watching the "In the Business of Games: Finding the Revenue Model of Tomorrow" talk this week. I'm hoping to glean some insights on ethical monetisation models!