Dan Pearce: From BAFTA Young Designer to Breakthrough Brit

Dan Pearce is quite the rising star in the UK video game industry. Four years ago, back when he was just 16, Pearce won the first ever BAFTA Young Game Designers competition alongside two friends, marking the start of his development career. "Yeah, that was weird," he laughs. "That propelled me into the industry quite fast. Basically we just wrote in a design doc about a hamster." This wasn't the first time that Pearce had contemplated making games for a living. Two years prior to that point, he had decided to commit to a life of making games once he'd finished school. "I said 'I'm definitely going to do this - if I can't make this work, then I don't want to do anything else,'" he notes. "So I sent off a design doc with my two friends, and then we just sort of kept doing well. We did some phone inerviews, BAFTA seemed to like us, and then we won, and I got to meet Neville Longbottom." 10 Second Ninja, Pearce's latest release, was actually one of his first ever projects. It was his "learning to program" game, back when he still wasn't very good at it. "I think I was 17 when I started 10 Second Ninja," he notes. "I decided OK, I'm going to make a project where it's more objective design, so I know I'm going to have tons of reference material, and tons of example games that I can learn from, and I can definitely make this thing." It ended up taking him two years to complete, since getting the game polished to the level he wanted was more work than he'd first expected -- but it's finally out of the door and available via Steam.

What's interesting is that Pearce has now gone full circle with BAFTA. The organization chose him as one of its first ever "Breakthrough Brits" this year -- essentially helping the young designer to stand out even more -- and he says that BAFTA has really helped him get into the industry. There was a bit of a false start along the way. Pearce decided to go to university to study video game design, but found after a short while that it really wasn't for him at all. "My uni wasn't very good," he says. "University works for some people, and some institutions are really good. But a lot of courses are very limited in their view on the industry and the way in which things work, and if they have, say, a group of lecturers who haven't worked on games since the PS2-era, that's not good enough. The games industry is progressing very, very fast. A lot of the lessons they try to teach you don't work. That can be problematic." "The best thing to do is talk to people as much as you can," he adds. "I think even without the help from BAFTA, I've been very active on Twitter (@GameDesignDan) for a couple of years now, and I've built up quite a good network of other game developers, people in press circles, things like that. That's been more useful to me than my entire year at uni was." "That comes highly recommended: Talk to people." 10 Second Ninja is out now on Steam.