UCAN Create Masterclass 1

Fun, fast paced and engaging are just a few words that come to mind to describe UCAN Create’s first masterclass with yello brick.  http://yellobrick.co.uk/#stage-section

On Friday December the 4th UCAN Productions and yello brick hosted their first UCAN Create masterclass at the Cardiff University, School of Optometry and Vision Sciences.  UCAN Create is all about creating, producing and showcasing your own work.  It gives young people the opportunity to learn a new skill, work with some amazing people and create something new and unique.

The first session was run by yello brick.  We were taken on a crash course in game creation for theatre and unusual spaces.  Having the opportunity to work with UCAN members and a new group of participants was an exciting experience.   The first introduction into street gaming involved using dried spaghetti.  They made us play a game as a way of explaining the different parts of game creation, everyone found this really effective. Everyone was stood in a circle, joined to the people either side by a piece of spaghetti.  The aim of the game was to be the last pair standing with an unbroken piece of spaghetti.  They used this practical approach as an effective way of showing how the formula can work to create the basis of a very simple game and then built upon to create something more complex. We learnt that a game can be broken up into 4 simple parts.

We were then split into groups and given half and hour where we had to choose blind a genre, location and tech.  It was the group’s responsibility to choose the mechanic to create a game to share with the whole group at the end.  One group random selection were Zombies (genre), Castle(location) and Ribbon (tech).  With these three parts they created a game of Zombie Tag.  Another group choose sci-fi(genre), a bridge(location) and counters(tech), which they used to create a collection game.  Players had to collect the corresponding chips, which created a shape that then gave a code word.  This code word would get you across a bridge to a safe land.  Players only had 5 minutes to find the chips and only three pairs out of 6 could cross.

As an entire group we got to play each other's games and then give each other feedback.  It was a great experience to see how quickly everyone had created such simple but effective funs games, which we all enjoyed playing.  This class truly gave us enough knowledge to go away and start creating our own games.  Maybe this is an idea for the next UCAN festival?  Who knows!?  

This masterclass was a great start to the UCAN Create project and we’re all very excited about the next upcoming sessions.