We’re big supporters of helping lift others up. We work with community organizations, educators and individuals to help spread skills, knowledge and opportunity when and where we can. Take a look at some of the ways we’re reaching out and connecting outside the studio to make things happen:
Community Building
Growing up I always knew I wanted to be a game designer. Sadly my hometown had little to no signs of tech jobs, let alone the video game industry. It’s hard growing up knowing you’d have to leave your home and family if you want to pursue your dreams. Leaving to join the industry was hard, but the goal was always to come back. Coming home and starting Massive Corporation is about building that missing industry so that the next generation don’t face the same dilemma. It’s about building local industry and opportunities and a community that know, participate in, and believe in game development happening locally.
SaskGameDev
We founded SaskGameDev in 2017 as an unofficial community organization dedicated to supporting game development in Saskatchewan. It brings together people across the province to connect, share, support and promote one another to help foster skills development, game projects and digital entrepreneurship. With over 500 members province-wide it has a solid community with diverse skills and abilities all working to help grow the industry in Saskatchewan. It has an active online community and has held numerous events including skill workshops, get togethers, and showcases. There was even a short documentary it got some positive mention in – you can watch it here.
Educational Outreach
We’ve been involved with a lot of educational outreach! We’ve visited classrooms across the province both in-person and virtually to provide coding workshops, career information sessions, assist with genius hour projects, give tech demonstrations, industry Q&A, student mentorship and guest lectures.
Running coding workshops for kids as young as 6, through all grades of primary and secondary school (like Campus Regina Public), as well as post-secondary and post-graduate classes, we know education. We’ve also demonstrated or presented at career fairs (like RDIEC’s Try-A-Trade event), conferences, and conventions across the country, but focused mainly on our home province of Saskatchewan where there’s an enormous need to catch up on tech skills and industry growth.
Grants & Mentorship
Supporting learners and entrepreneurs is about more than just public talks, real change comes from direct action. We’ve been proud to help mentor students and entrepreneurs with direct advice, review, critique and assistance. This has ranged from student mentorship to professional development.
Massive Sacks of Cash
We put our money where our mouth is. We believe in our local community, and to make sure they know that, and to make sure they can go the distance we created the Massive Sacks of Cash grant. The grant offered up $500 a month for one year to one winning applicant to help give them a sustainable support mechanism that could help lift the burden of paying the bills so they could spend more time and effort on working on their projects.
No obligations, no restraints, they could spend the money however they liked and gave up no control. A radically different approach than most grants, but one that uniquely suits the situation in Saskatchewan. It was built to suit the indie community since so little professional business and talent pool exists here. We knew the need was to focus on and support the talent pool at the lowest level to build the foundations for bigger, latter success. We received an amazing response to it, and we hope to run another round of it again soon.
Media Appearances
As cheerleaders for the industry and one of the few veteran companies in the province we do a lot of outreach and promotion work. Check out the following examples of some of the media appearances we’ve made over the years:
- Video game set in Regina will be a playful homage to the Queen City | Regina Leader-Post
- Queen City Chaos video game showcases the city of Regina – CBC Saskatchewan
- Local game developer creates video game set in Regina | CTV News Regina
- New video games turns the Queen City virtual | Global News
- Get in the Game: Game Development Holds Promise for the Saskatchewan Tech Sector – Industry West
- Deal maker or breaker: Sask. game developers give new equity fund mixed reviews
- Regina company grant to help grow video game industry in Saskatchewan
- Regina game developer creates grant to grow industry talent in Saskatchewan
- ‘Enormous opportunity’: Regina developer helping Sask. cash in on gaming market
- Would you give $6000 of your own money to help a stranger achieve their dreams?
- Inaugural Recipient of the Massive Sacks of Cash grant announced at Global Game Jam 2020 | Global News
Interviews
Aside from mainstream media we also love to do interviews with students, entrepreneurs, podcasts and student media. Here’s a sampling of appearances:
Saskatoon Student Interview
We got contacted by a pair of entrepreneurial students in Saskatoon who had a class assignment about researching future careers. Ibrahim and Graham paired up to investigate what careers in video game development could be like and reached out to us as one of the few game companies in Saskatchewan to find out more. We thought we’d take the opportunity to share some wisdom with the next generation and share the interview online so that other young students could better understand the industry from the inside.
Watch Part 2 here
Technical College Student Interview
Not long after we got contacted by a student at NAIT (the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) that was doing a similar career prospects assignment. Again we felt this information would be a big help to any number of college students helping them understand working in the game industry, especially as a freelance contractor.