Congratulations are in order to Joshua McGrath for taking out the top position in this year's Quantas Spirit of Youth Awards (SOYA) in the interactive gaming category. It's the second year running for SOYA and this unique award, and apart from the prestige of winning such a title, Joshua has been given the opportunity of a role in Soap Creative's Los Angeles office. From SOYA...
Joshua’s background in creative writing, musical acoustics and Computer Science helps inform the development of his games, which unite his love of literature and surreal humour with lush sound designs and an accessible graphical and gameplay style. This extra element drew the attention of the mentors: “What won us over was that Josh not only showed a keen eye for what makes a game fun but he was also thinking beyond ‘games’ and building tools for others to create with.”
Joshua is, of course, one half of the two person independent games development team based in Sydney, Doppler Interactive, who released the colourful, fun, and free iPad game, Ball of Woe, late last year. Doppler Interactive are also responsible for the very well known Tidy TileMapper tool available on the Unity asset store.
The mentors from Soap Creative, Ashley Ringrose & Bradley Eldridge, who selected Joshua from a list of finalists which include Shane Brouwer (Super Lemonade Factory) and Andrew Sum (Dungeon Dashers), had this to say about the young games developers in Australia...
Firstly it’s inspiring to see so many talented people creating games that are being played around the world and more selfishly it’s great seeing so much talent we could potentially bring onto our team at Soap. The interactive gaming section of SOYA is a varied one. You have game artists, designers, coders and everyone else in between all contributing to the product. It’s a multi-faceted area that breeds multi-faceted people.