Eleven weeks to build the things that decide whether a studio, a university or a funder ever replies to you. Here's what you're making, and why it matters.
Last year you learned to make things. This year you find out whether anyone outside this building can tell. That is the entire unit.
Slap Bang Digital was founded in Belfast in 2024 by one person. In 2026 it was at Gamescom in Cologne with a funded game. Buck Eejit started in 2022 and did the same. Two years is the exact length of your course.
Roughly how long someone spends on a junior applicant's portfolio before deciding. Not because they're lazy — because there are three hundred of them and one afternoon.
Nobody in the industry is going to ask what grade you got in B1. What they will ask for is a link. This unit exists because the gap between people who get into games and people who don't is very rarely talent — it's whether there was anything to look at when someone went looking.
You already have a year of work sitting on a hard drive. Games you helped build, art you made, code you wrote, problems you solved at 2am. Right now, none of it is visible to anyone who isn't in this room. Over the next eleven weeks you're going to turn it into a showreel, a virtual gallery, a website and a public repository — plus the boring paperwork that makes people take the interesting stuff seriously.
The unit is graded on evidence, not enthusiasm. "I worked really hard on this" isn't assessable. "Here are three versions of this piece, here's the feedback that caused each change, here's why the final one is better" is.
Five criteria. All five must be at least a Pass — you cannot trade a brilliant showreel against a missing progression plan.
Did you find out how this job really works, from real sources?
Did you plan a route, get feedback, and change the plan?
Did you actually build the materials, well?
Did you behave like someone hireable?
Can you show your work and talk about it?
Tap any item. Nothing here is busywork invented for the folder — every single one is a thing you would need anyway if you applied for a job in March.
Pick a criterion, then switch between Pass, Merit and Distinction to see the same piece of work at three different levels. The examples use your real deliverables.
Northern Ireland's games industry is small enough that you can genuinely meet most of it, and that is an advantage, not a limitation. In a city of ten thousand developers you are anonymous. Here, one good conversation gets remembered.
Most of these studios are under fifteen people. That means no keyword filter between you and a human being, hiring that happens through visibility rather than adverts, and founders who were exactly where you are within recent memory. It also means when you turn up to something twice, they know your face.
Pick three of these. Find out what they've made, who works there in the role you want, and what that person did before. Then find one thing they've said publicly — a talk, a devlog, an interview, a post — and quote what you learned from it in your research file. That is the difference between listing studios and researching them.
Assessment jargon, industry jargon and the local acronyms. If a word confuses you in a brief or a job advert, it should be here.