Manifesto

All our dreams can come true — if we have the courage to pursue them. – Walt Disney

Purpose and Goals

In APT GameGenerator we believe in the collective effort of making video games. People can make their game ideas a reality if they work together and support each other. One person hardly ever has the time or the skills needed to make a great game. Sharing the knowledge, the skills and the workload is essential for realizing great ideas.
Our goals in APT GG are:

  1. Provide a collaborative environment for our members to find and help each other.
  2. Encourage learning among our members both through practice and from others.
  3. Support the creation of successful games and game studios in Estonia.

The Environment

Our organization provides us both a digital environment and a physical one for collaborating with other members. The digital environment consists of our Facebook group, webpage, YouTube and Twitch channels. These are meant to share information about our different projects, member activities, events and learning materials. The physical environment is the 3D Kasvuhoone in Aparaaditehas (Kastani 42). There we can meet other members in real life, work on different game ideas and projects, participate in organized events or just hang out.

Learning

We do not expect our members to be experienced professionals or have a formal education in a game development related field. However, we do encourage everyone to become experienced professionals and definitely learn about the fields that interest them. To support learning we share different guides and principles about game development and try to demonstrate the skills and knowledge possible to acquire from a formal education. If members have some knowledge, ideas or skills to share, we encourage them to conduct a presentation or a workshop on our regular meeting time. This also helps our members to enhance their presentational skills, which can prove to be important in their future life. Several times in a year we organise bigger game jam events, which help our members to build new skills or enhance the speed of the current ones. These game jams encourage the learning-by-doing approach.

APT GameGenerator believes that learning is most effective when done with moderate pace in a collaborative environment. In APT GG we expect our members to develop the game projects together with their teams as much as they can. Each month we have at least one meeting dedicated for our projects in order for the members to share, what they have done and learned. There are also rewards for the teams who progress their games.

Creation

In APT GameGenerator we are committed in supporting your projects in any way we can. Besides providing a network for finding great team members and encouraging you to learn throughout your game making process, we can support all our projects in a more direct fashion. This includes promotions of the projects in different events or public announcements. We can also organize game testing sessions or ask for feedback from experienced game designers. Our webpage has a list of our prominent projects with descriptions and external links.

The ultimate goal here is for you to create your own successful game studios under which to make and sell your games. If you create yourself a steady income then making newer and better games in the future will be more easier and fun for you. As this also positively impacts the Estonian economy then you being successful means a better life for everyone else as well.

Rules

  1. In order to become a member you just join our Facebook group.
  2. We require our members to be respectful to other members. Do not purposefully hurt others mentally or physically. Everyone here wants to make games and we do not tolerate anyone unreasonably criticizing others to the point where they lose hope. Failure to see the other people around you can lead to your removal from APT GG.
  3. There are no legal bindings between the projects and APT GG by default. We only hope that your projects will be successful and hope that you will remember us in the future. If you happen to be able to offer us some support (promotional, expertise, financial) then we will of course be happy to receive it. This is totally up to you and not mandatory in any way.
  4. If you want to use our logo in your game, then feel free to do so. We would be very happy. 🙂
  5. Every member is expected to support APT GG-s goals in any way they can. This means for example be active on our Facebook group, conduct a weekly talk, participate in the game projects and establish a game studio.
    Be present, participate, make games and have fun!

Why Do We Do All This?

As you probably noticed our goals are quite idealistic. This idealism is our primary motivator: If our members are doing well, then this will have a positive impact on the country. Both culturally and economically. In turn it will have a positive impact on all the people, including all of us.

A more pragmatic reason is that we want to make games. We want to make APT GG a place where we can make better games with new and interesting people from different disciplines.

Where Do We Get the Funding For All This?

We have a number of friends, collaborators and partners. They are all in the bottom of our webpage and on promotional materials. Our friends help with different things: from funding and physical rooms to the artistic theme and looks for our organization. Often times our friends have similar goals to ours and thus if we are doing well then they are doing well. 🙂